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.
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 ofRule 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.
My dear bisexual bard Billy Shakespeare, with a cool earring
That is, apparently, the ship name for William Shakespeare (of Sonnet 20 fame) and Christopher “Kit” Marlowe (of “all they who love not tobacco and boys are fools” fame).
Christopher Marlowe. (He also had a fantastic if somewhat anachronistic depiction by Jamie Campbell Bower in the short-lived TNT series Will)
This is Sonnet 20. “Draft,” meanwhile, plays with references to sonnet 144, in which the poet talks about his “Two loves,” a young man and a woman, betraying him in an angsty bisexual anthem.
Aside from them both being quite possibly, in the modern sense, queer men, and boundary-breaking playwrights both working in London in the early 1590s, very close in age, is there any reason to believe these two would have chemistry? I sure think so. Not least because I noticed some lines in each of their plays that would sound just delicious swapped between them–
Marlowe remained close to him, too close to meet his eyes. “Your pardon,” he said without a sign of remorse. His hand cupped Will’s cheek, tracing the bone, leaving another stripe of ink. He felt it drying on his skin, sable heat. He pulled back just enough to see it marking Marlowe’s lips, too.
So it had happened, then.
“Why … my pardon?”
“For the sake of your soul. They say it is a sin.” This time he spoke of damnation with something more gentle than delight, but still not regret, not anything close to it.
No more than Will felt. “If my lips have the sin they took … willingly … ” If some in their wills counted bad what he thought good, they only reckoned up their own abuses; he was that he was. As much a sinner as you, he thought, even if he was in no way as accomplished as this consummate blasphemer. “You wrong yourself too much.”
“A trespass sweetly urged.” His laughter sounded surprised. “Will you give me my sin again?”
“If,” Will said, as surprised himself, uncertain on his feet, but finding words, perhaps by the same ink-dark magic that brought him to this, “you give me my soul again.”
A scent of rosewater and cloves grew stronger as the space between them vanished, as the cool air warmed. Marlowe’s hair was soft against the backs of his fingers, the skin at his jaw and throat rough from the time that had passed since he’d last shaven – something Will had not considered about kissing a man. He ran his fingertips back and forth against the rasp, feeling the hum of Marlowe’s breath beneath. It passed across his lips, too, mingling with his, though Will hardly breathed while he kissed as if truly to retrieve his soul. He tasted the ink staining both their mouths, the richer flavor underneath.
-Thus this excerpt from “Draft,” my story in Cunning Linguists. If you, like me, are a grade-A nerrrd you will notice Kit is saying lines from Romeo and Juliet and Will lines from Doctor Faustus. These guys sure ascribed interesting powers to kisses… cunning linguists indeed.
The collection of stories about sex, storytelling, and speech (or silence*) is now available for preorder in paperback and comes out May 18th–less than a month from now!
The 30 authors are sharing excerpts, their favorite sex scenes they’ve ever read, “dirty” words that give them the shivers (usually in a good way — though not always!) and other fun facts on the New Smut Project blog.
You can find Cunning Linguists now at:
Gumroad (use coupon code CUNNING for 25% off ebook preorders and LINGUISTS for $1.50 US off paperback orders)
*Speaking of “silence,” I’ll leave you with this second, even steamier except from “Draft”:
A sound shaped itself in Will’s throat — not speech, only proof, surprising even to him, that he still had a voice.
Kit’s hand fastened at the back of his neck, fingers tangling in the curls of his hair, nails passing lightly over soft, vulnerable skin. “Don’t,” he said, “compose poetry now.”
He was right — even all these spilled words whose ink was staining them were meant, in the end, to be acted.
So he did. He let himself move, guided by instinct — nothing in this felt against nature — and by his partner’s guidance.
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!
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.
One Tongue – A.C. Quill
Dido Burns – Taylor Verdon
Blue Rising – Max Turner
Head to Toe – Camille Devine
I Ought to Be Thy Adam – Seb Palumbus
Barako – Rachel Woe
Draft – T.C. Mill
Astronautical Intimacy – Tiana Talaria
Sky-High at Aquarius – jem zero
The Meaning of Anything – Kristan X
Muse – Sprocket J. Rydyr
On the Line – Sonni de Soto
Noi Leggiavamo Per Diletto – Alex Freeman
We’re Not Tentacle Porn – Koji A. Dae
Spark to the Tinder – Cathy Bryant
Written – Ollie Fox
Frontiers – Moxie Marcus
Cave Suckers – Elizabeth A. Allen
Under the Table – Rachel Kramer Bussel
Planet Rolling Over – Peach Berman
Moonlight and Madness – A. Zimmerman
First Time – Alex Yan
Inkmanship – Melissa Snowdon
Welcome to EvolWorld – Louise Kane
Spell Ling B – D. Fostalove
Unsexed, Sexy – Danny McLaren
The Feeling’s Mutual – D.J. Hodge
The Training of the Tongue – Evadare Volney
More Than Words – Lillian James
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:
Gumroad (use coupon code CUNNING for 25% off preorders)
(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!)
I texted my sister last night, “Just had a panel of like 25 sexperts agree with my editorial decisions twice. (Two stories from Erato are Good Sex Award finalists.) Feels great!”
And it does.
I’m actually not sure of the number of sexperts involved–the Good Sex Awards has an awe-inspiring list of judges, some of whom I have giddy “Omg did they read and like the story?” feelings for, some of whom I hadn’t known of before. I don’t know if they all read for every category, but I get the impression they each had a lot of reading, because my circle was buzzing with authors excited to submit their stories to the Award.
Full disclosure: I submitted two pieces myself, previously published in anthologies and magazines outside of NSP, neither of which were finalists. But that’s okay. The competition was steep and high-quality!
Enough about me. After all, I can’t take a lot of credit–just enough to feel proud that two stories I (and my co-editors–I can’t take all the credit even for this part!) read and was like “Wow, this is great, I want to publish it and share it with other readers” also produced that “Wow, this is great!” feeling in some other readers.
Frankly, I’m probably just lucky these two authors decided to submit their stories to Erato before some other lucky editor snapped them up.
But putting together Erato had its rough moments, with a staggering personal loss right in the middle of the project that sometimes had me wondering if we’d make it through. Part of what kept me going was the quality and significance of the stories we had to publish. So this moment feels…vindicating? Hopeful? It’s the part of the biofilm where they can stop rolling and freeze on my smiling bright-eyed face cuz we’re on the right high note.
Anyway–
Big congratulations to Jem Zero and D. Fostalove, whose stories “A Study in Circuits and Charcoal” and “Touch” from Erato are finalists for the Good Sex Awards!
“A Study in Circuits and Charcoal” is a finalist for Best Feminist Sex. You can read it here and read Jem Zero’s interview about zir story here on our blog
“Touch” is a finalist for Best Sexy Talk. You can read it here and read D. Fostalove’s interview about his story here on our blog.
Finalist stories are candidates for the Good Sex Award’s Readers’ Choice Award. Voting runs until June 20. You–yes, you, dear reader–can check out all the sexiest stories on The Good Bits website and fill out your ballot here!
Cunning Linguists will collect 20 to 30 pieces of diverse, feminist, body-positive erotica exploring the seductive potential of:
Literature—
Reading a sexy story to yourself, or to a lover. Writing a sexy story for yourself, or for a lover, or for a friend. Reading a story that wasn’t intended to be sexy but, well, it turns out you’ve got a new kink.
The narratives we construct about our sex and love lives, or have constructed for us, or deconstruct. The patterns we and our cultures make and break.
Sexy thoughts we have about other people’s stories and characters—yes, send us your fanfiction! For legal reasons, please stick to works in the public domain.
Literary structures: write an epistolary story collecting the steamy letters a 19th century abolitionist sent to his boyfriend. Take it into the 21st century with sexts. Or the 23rd century with a hologram.
Write a story entirely in dialogue. Write a sex scene that also works as slam poetry. Write a story that travels back in time with each scene—paraphrasing Sam Goldwyn (well, allegedly), open with an orgasm and then work us up to a climax.
Language—
Make love to and with your favorite words. Or take a new look at your less favorite. Which is sexier—dirty talk or sonnets? Quote Shakespeare in sexts. Make pillow talk about all the dirty words in Shakespeare. Convince us moist is actually a turn-on. Is it a dick or a cock? Is her sex better than her pussy or vice versa? And is cunt an insult or a term of worship?
Write with and about the words that send a shiver down the spine, that make a heart skip beats or knees go weak.
Write about the feeling of finally finding the right word to describe your sexuality.
What about wordplay? What’s the sexist literary device—parallelism? Zeugma? Alliteration? Even a good pun gets us laughing, and laughter can be sexy. Or dare we say, puns can make us moan as well as groan.
What about wordlessness—pleasure that sends lovers beyond words? The use of nonverbal communication?
And what about the unspeakable? Reveal what someone has never been able to talk about. What’s more naked than the truth?–Maybe the right lie?
Keep in mind that, alongside this anthology’s focus on words, the most erotic stories are sensual—texture, taste, and scent play a role in addition to sights and sounds. We don’t have as many words for smell as we do for vision, but what can we do with the words we have? Perhaps you can coin new words. Plus there’s synesthesia, and a sixth sense, or seventh sense… For many, isn’t reading itself a form of synesthesia, transforming sight into sound? And how do telepaths talk dirty?
Length and Payment:
$30 for flash fiction up to 1,000 words
$100 for short stories from 2,500—6,000 words
(Wordcount requirements aren’t firm if you’re within rounding distance. Or query first.)
Contributors will also receive a free ebook copy of the anthology and a discount on paperback copies.
Submission deadline: September 1, 2021. Final decisions will be made by November 2021.
Release planned for Spring 2022.
Genre, pairing:
Just about any, and any. Contemporary, historical, speculative fiction, romance, mystery, literary character study, prose poem—really, the only genre we don’t accept is erotic horror because it’s led to too many submissions that don’t fit the rest of our guidelines or our mission. Paranormal takes on creatures like ghosts and vampires, as well as stories with a bittersweet tinge (we do want the “sweet” along with the bitter—we love stories that show a sense of compassion) will be considered!
No limits on the gender or number of participants, so long as they are 18+ and express their affirmative consent.
eBooks! You can buy them online! eBooks! I’m compose catchier lyrics but I’m out of ti-ime!
Opening announcement related to the subject of this post: Smashwords’s annual Read an Ebook sale runs March 7-March 13, 2021. You can check out all the books included in the sale here. And you can check out which of my books are available here–including several that are free this week.
You’ll note that no New Smut Project books are included. There’s two reasons for that–the meat of this post:
First, especially if you’re interested in the first two anthologies from NSP, keep your eye on them, because something fun will happen for their sixth birthday around March 23, and I didn’t want to confuse things by running multiple promos in a single month.
Second, while I do include NSP anthologies in some Smashwords sales, I never discount them below 50% (with the exception of Smashwords’s Authors Give Back sale last spring, which was…like so much of 2020…an unprecedented response to unprecedented times). Sales are good for promotion, getting the books in front of new eyes. They also give people who don’t have a lot of disposable income for book-buying the chance to pick up a title they’ve had on their wishlist. I want NSP’s books to be accessible. At the same time, I’ve picked a base price for them that I know is worth the value they offer.
After all, $8 (and under $20 in paperback) for 400 pages of smut and erotic romance is a good value. Erato, for $7 (or $16 in paperback), offers 50+ erotic scenes–less than 15 cents each. And then I’m humbled and excited–humblcited?–when reviews of the anthologies name a particular story or handful of stories as “Worth the price of admission on their own” (human taste being what it is, they don’t often name the same stories). That’s exactly the kind of value we want our books to provide!
In A People’s Guide to Publishing, Joe Biel remarks on the complexities of book pricing, and especially discounting, on a much larger scale than NSP has yet reached:
In 2012, I was on a panel at a festival in Pendleton, Oregon, about the future of books. The opposing view of my own was presented by a woman who had sold 100,000 copies of her fantasy novel eBook. At that time I had sold a little over 1.3 million books, with about 100,000 copies of my bestseller. Naturally, the juice was in the details. The other panelist revealed that the first 30,000 copies of her book had been ‘sold’ for free. She had then raised the price to 99 cents for the next 30,000 and the remaining 40,000 copies had sold for $2.99, making her net profit less than $15,000. Still, she was the envy of the room… But after expenses and paying the author, our company had netted over $400,000 on 100,000 copies of one title alone.
Now, Biel’s Microcosm Publishing uses offset printing, which means more money is earned per hard copy sold. And frankly, I wouldn’t say a strident No to the chance to sell 100,000 copies of any book I’ve worked on for ~$15,000 net earnings. That would be a significant chunk of change for my purposes and better yet, many readers.
After all, I’m giving away some books for free or for 99 cents this very week in hopes of getting more readers. Readers are fantastic :D, plus several of my stories have themes–like To Have and To Hold, which breaks down herpes stigma–that I want to reach as many people as possible. (It’s not like I’m wearing a sandwich board on the street corner, either–if I say so myself, the honeymoon pegging sex in THaTH is damn hot.) However, it’s a lot simpler to give my own short stories away for free than to give away longer work, much less someone else’s work.
Contributors to the first two New Smut Project anthologies are paid entirely by royalties–if sales of those books earn nothing, neither do the writers. And if Erato was given away for free, NSP would have no source of income to pay authors for future anthologies. In the future, as we have more books for sale, perhaps one could be made a “loss leader” or even “permafree”–but Biel’s whole point is that successful publishers don’t need to do that, and there are other reasons offering a book at a step discount can backfire.
For instance, the matter of perceived value. These are good books. A lot of time and effort went into making them. The presentation–from cover art to price–should reflect that.
Another reason is that the customers who buy something just because it’s cheap or discounted might not be the ones who vibe with the product itself: in Worth Every Penny,Sarah Petty and Erin Verbeck share results of research into Groupon follow-ups: “We find a surge in [Yelp] reviews subsequent to the offer. But we also find that reviewers mentioning ‘Groupons’ and ‘coupons’ provide strikingly lower rating scores than those that do not.”
For ebooks specifically, Catherine Ryan Howard observes in Self-Printed: The Sane Person’s Guide to Self-Publishing that readers who buy ebooks simply because they’re inexpensive are often not the authors’ target audience. When an ebook is priced at $4.99 or $6.99 rather than $2.99 or $0.99, it’s not a complete impulse purchase: the reader looks at the description, checks out reviews, and reads the sample pages before deciding to buy. This avoids 1-star reviews from church ladies who bought a 99 cent erotica book (or suspense, science fiction, historical fiction…basically any genre) and were shocked to see it contains the f-word.
Howard also recommends increasing an ebook’s price over time if it continues to sell, but I’m not sure that’s fair to readers. And if I wouldn’t feel good about it, I can’t use it as a pricing strategy. But maybe it’s “fairer” than an alternative of setting a high initial price and discounting afterward? Yet the marketing tip I’d learned is that big fans and ‘leader’ types will be fine with paying a little more if they get the item they want right away. Readers who wait for discounts pay with their patience rather than money. (And either way, they’re committed to the book because they want the story it tells, not because it’s cheap.)
Overall, I try to keep prices stable, with occasional well-advertised discounts for promotion and accessibility. To reflect the value of the book and have room for offering discounts, I need to price above rock bottom.
And discounts offer one more benefit: a way to circumvent Jeff Bezos. Smashwords’s sales attract readers to buy directly from Smashwords rather than Amazon (not only does this fight the monopoly, but authors surely appreciate receiving Smashwords’s 85% royalty rate rather than Amazon’s 70%–and while 85% of a discounted price may be less, it’s not like readers only buy on Smashwords during Read an Ebook Week. The sale just helps encourage more people to set up accounts and make purchases there). On the New Smut Project’s Gumroad store, where we receive ~90% of each sale, we’re able to offer discount codes to each newsmutprojectfan—get it? That’s the discount code. We don’t keep it secret because we want people to use it. You save a dollar, we earn more, and Jeff Bezos gets none–except at most the print cost of a paperback, which, yes, we’re currently printing on demand through Kindle Direct Publishing. It’s the most inexpensive POD option, thereby helping us price our books more accessibly and earn more to pay authors. Is it ungrateful of me to acknowledge the benefits Amazon offers us while also trying not to earn them as much money? I figure Amazon does get paid for the books it prints (see discussion here) and all the books sold through its storefront, which it is plenty good at attracting people to use. But that doesn’t make me their feudal vassal obligated to ensure they get 30%+ of all purchases of the books I publish.
Selling off of Amazon does knock a book’s Amazon sales rank and theoretically harms its visibility in the store, but frankly, I don’t expect most people to discover my books on a random walk through Amazon. Heck, I searched for “consensual erotica” (one of Between the Shores’s keywords) the other day and my results included The Story of O. “Discoverability” on Amazon doesn’t seem like all it’s cracked up to be, or nearly as achievable. Plus, given the rise of Bookshop.org last year, I like to think there’s a larger trend of online book buyers looking at shopfronts other than Amazon. (NSP books are available through Bookshop.org! We only receive the “expanded distribution” KDP royalty rate for them, but 10% of your purchase price goes to support local bookshops—and another 10% is paid as an affiliate fee when you buy through my storefront—so consider yourself encouraged to shop there, if my encouragement matters.)
I’ll put it this way: 50% of Erato’s earnings during its first month of sales–October 23-November 23, 2020–came through our Gumroad store.
So there’s my outlook on ebook pricing (and a little bit on paperbacks). If you’ve discovered that this is the most interesting topic in the world to you, first off, I’m delighted and want you to be my new best friend. Second, you might love Jamie McGarry’s series on small press publishing on Medium, which goes even deeper into these topics. Here, for instance, he talks about discounting and distribution.
The New Smut Project’s third anthology of literary erotica is released October 24, 2020.
Each individual story is short (6 pages or less), but with fifty of them, there’s quite a lot of erotic adventure within.
Explore Paleolithic caves and far-flung planets, seduced with magic, mythology, and dreams while wryly acknowledging the reality that sometimes sex requires stretching. Alongside old favorites like temperature play and strap-ons, have you considered the erotic potential of shaving or a handful of coins?
Characters who are cis, trans, and nonbinary explore their desires, whether gay, straight, lesbian, bi and pan, or ace! With flash fiction from experienced storytellers and hot new talent, there’s no need to “skip to the good parts” in this collection: every moment will caress the senses and linger in the mind, while being short enough to read over a cup of coffee or during a bus ride.
Ebook Bundle Readers often buy both of our first anthologies together, which is no surprise, as we couldn’t pick between them ourselves! With the release of our latest publication, Erato, this bundle saves you $3 by ordering all three ebooks as one unit. Buy from Gumroad »
Paperback Bundle Save $10 by ordering all 3 paperbacks from the New Smut Project together: Between the Shores; Heart, Body, Soul; and Erato: Flash Fiction. Buy from Gumroad»
It’s been a little over a month since my girlfriend/boytoy/submissive/beloved passed away in his sleep, shortly after swapping sappy and naughty texts with me about books we were reading. When I look back on this month, it is not a total blank. But time has blurred for me. And I am far less organized than usual. Dishes pile up in the sink for a few days before I remember to wash them (and I don’t have a certain visitor to order to wash them for me anymore).
I learned the term “Widow’s brain”–also called “widow’s fog”–in a bereaved partners support group online. I’m not sure the term “widow” applies to me–I had collared my submissive, we talked about being together for the rest of our lives, and we were together for the rest of his, but compared to many of the people on these forums we weren’t together for all that long. We never lived together, though we visited frequently (less frequently with quarantine, but as two freelancers who each lived alone we decided to count each other as a “household” for pandemic purposes, meeting face to face to offer emotional, moral, and physical support). Still, the fog doesn’t care about those technical distinctions. It has descended.
I spend a lot of time in bed, remembering him. They’re beautiful memories and comforting.
I’m also spending a lot of time writing. I started a journal about a month ago that now has 100,000 words of memories in it, plus many, many sheets of scrap paper covered with notes I haven’t yet typed up. Years from now this will give me something to look back on, perhaps. Right now, I just know the writing gives me something to do. It motivates me to get through each day and it’s helping me make sense of some things.
I have also been working on copyedits to Erato. My ability to spot stray commas seems to be about as sharp as ever, and authors have been awesome and proactive in revising their work to show it at its best. And its best is considerable. These stories are beautiful, though rereading some of them is bittersweet–more memories evoked. My girlfriend was so excited for this anthology and looked forward to reading it with me. Quite a few pieces were personally meaningful to him for their takes on kink and gender, though he knew them mostly by reputation from my texting him about the cool story I was reading. And, well, this may be slightly TMI but part of the point of NSP is that good sex is worth talking about, our last evening and afternoon together were made even better, gilded lilies, thanks to ideas I had from some of the stories I’d been editing. That on its own would be enough to make the work of putting the anthology together worth it.
My goal is still to get the anthology published this October. I think this goal will be doable, though again, widow’s brain has made some progress slower than I would like. For instance, I want to announce the Table of Contents soon. But I hit this weird barrier where my mind doesn’t seem to understand how to format a Table of Contents announcement. I’ll get through it.
I’ll be frank: I think Erato’s amazing authors deserve better than the fogginess. I think I deserve better than the fogginess. My girlfriend deserves to be alive. But it is what it is.
My last post shared some of my girlfriend’s writing (and he was also responsible for this silly and delightful sex toy review). His literary legacy will continue in a number of ways, which I’ll announce as they come up. But recently I received a contract for Rachel Kramer Bussell’s 2021 anthology Coming Soon–my story, about a three-way encounter between a bisexual waitress and a D/s couple, was inspired by a bit of brainstorming with my submissive, and I’m thrilled it’s found a home.
It doesn’t feel quite right to say I miss him because he doesn’t exactly feel gone. I’m thinking about him almost every moment of the day–not a big difference from when he was alive. Except I can’t send him a “Thinking of you” text and hear back “What a coincidence, Ma’am, I was having a delightful reverie of you myself.”
When it gets really hard, I remind myself of what my service submissive would do for me if he was here. Bring me food or coffee. Hug me or rub my feet. Tell me about Braveheart’s historical inaccuracies to take my mind off things. Simply kneel at my side while I cried and talked about my uncertainties or regrets or sadness. He can’t do this for me anymore, but I can feed myself and let myself cry for him.
