Tag Archives: erotica

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With less than five minutes till the deadline for Exhibit A’s Sinful Stories 2 competition, I can’t work out how to embed Molly Moore’s gorgeous photo, the one that speaks to all my kinks, into the post! Argh! Anyway, you’ll find it here.  And my second competition entry is below…

***

It all started with Simon Jamieson in Year 9. All those dotted characters whose dots she could turn into perfect bubble hearts as she married herself off to him on the back of her English exercise book. Gemma Jamieson. Gemma Thompson-Jamieson. GJ. Mrs Gemma Jamieson. He turned out to be a cunt, though. Obviously.

All through her twenties it was the same story, worse even. She no longer met anyone she could see herself marrying, and the guys she did meet didn’t give a fuck who *she* was. They didn’t even call her Gemma – it was always ‘Baby,’ ‘Sweetheart,’ or even ‘Baby Gem,’ like the lettuce. She bloody hated salad.

Alex called her ‘Great tits,’ right from the night she met him. Somehow it was the best nickname she’d ever had. He called her other names, too: ‘Slut,’ ‘Whore,’ ‘Filthy bitch.’ Hard words that she found herself begging him to say. He’d hold her down and sink his thumbs or his teeth deep into her collarbone, her neck, her breasts. She was fascinated by the bruises that formed in the aftermath: the way they sprang up within hours where her skin was delicate and close to the bone, only to appear whole days later on the softer bits round her nipples and on her tummy.

Date night, to her surprise, was still a thing. He could fuck her mouth so hard it made tears stream down her cheeks, tell her to clean herself up, then take her out to dinner *and* let her share his dessert. Why had nobody ever told her it could be like that?

And dinner did nothing to sate his appetite for her. On the way home he’d fuck her in dark alleyways, shop doorways, bus stops. She remembered them all, of course, but none stood out more than the subway.

The subway made her feel vulnerable – that was why she loved it. He made her strip off her clothes, fold them neatly and pile them on the damp, filthy floor. He made her walk a hundred yards from where she’d left them, to the point at which the tunnel sloped back towards the road, and told her to keep watch. It didn’t escape her notice that no one was watching the other entrance, and nor was she sure what she was guarding against.

She heard the hiss of paint and swung her head round. In broad strokes, he’d sprayed her initials in the formation in which he liked to mark her: big and black and smudgy right above her heart and then two smaller, redder swellings either side of it. The formation in which he *did* mark her, there under his graffiti, the smell of solvent still thick in the air. He fucked her, hard, and then he got up and went to fetch her dress.

He’d reduced her to nothing more than a body. He’d sprayed her tits with his come and the wall with an elegy to her tits. She stretched. The concrete bit into her arse. Her grazes stung. It felt like coming home.

***Massive thanks to @Mollysdailykiss for permission to use her gorgeous pic, obviously. Thanks Molly! x ***

 

Cold for July

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He was hot in the way of British summers: longed for, sticky and never around for as long as you wanted.

That said, they’d lasted a year, on and off, even though she was never quite sure what their deal was. He’d flitted in and out of her life, butterfly-like, and she’d chased him, more than a little eager to stick pins through his wings. He even fucked on top of the covers, as if he couldn’t bear to be beneath them, trapped in the fug of his own body heat.

At first, she’d struggled to associate that on-top-of-the-duvet fucking with intimacy – she wanted the two of them rolled beneath it, not these marooned-on-top shags she got instead. But she’d learnt, with time, that they didn’t need cotton and feathers to bind them – it was enough to wind her arms around his neck as he buried his cock deep inside her and to feel his sweat-slick skin stick to hers as he held it there.

A year in, she still puts in more effort than he deserves. Tonight, for example, she’s wearing the killer heels she knows he loves, and she’s stopped at the hairdresser on her way home from work to have her fringe trimmed. Her hair’ll be out of place ten minutes after he walks through the door.

After sex, her fringe always sticks to her face, and he’ll peel it away and kiss her damp and salty forehead. The room smells of the two of them, and she holds on tight to him, and wills his cock not to soften. ‘I just want you inside me’ – those words trip so often from her tongue, her emails, her iPhone keypad, that they’re like a mantra now.

Tonight though, she never got the chance to say them. Tonight he cut her off before they were even fully naked: he took the hand that was reaching for his belt and guided it gently back to the mattress. She tried to break free, at first – he was just playing Dom, right?

He was playing Dom, as it happened, but with someone new. Someone he’d met in a bar, a few weeks back. Someone he’d thought would be just another fling. But things change…

He didn’t want to mess her around.

And so she let him let himself out. He did it quietly, without fuss. As break-ups went, it was one of her better ones. But the bed, the one she’d always slept alone in six nights out of seven, was too big without him. She slipped down into the gap between the bed and the radiator, where the space felt more manageable, more contained. It didn’t stop her shaking.

She turned the radiator on. It was cold for July.

***

This is an entry for Exhibit A’s Sinful Stories 2 competition. Many thanks to @Flutterbyflip for permission to base the story on her beautiful and inspiring photo.

Cosmopolitan? Provincial, more like…

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It’s a mystery to me why, even though I’m always knackered, even though I often fall asleep midway through a wank and wake up an hour or so later with an erotica anthology on my face and my vibe buzzing against my thigh, there is always, *always* time for more Twitter before bed. Often, of course, it’s a waste of valuable sleep time, but from time to time I stumble upon something that makes me think that final scroll through my TL was worth it.

Last night was one such night. Ella Dawson and Eva Gantz were having a conversation about this post of Ella’s, and her surprise that it hadn’t garnered more of a reaction. I was surprised too, because it’s fucking fantastic. In fact, my guilt at piggybacking a post off it is somewhat offset by the knowledge that I’m now sharing it at a bit more of a reasonable hour. That said, she doesn’t need me to share it again: it’s certainly been noticed by the sex blogging/erotica community now. Yay! Go Ella!

It got me thinking about collaborations in the world of erotica, and whether they’re ever a good thing. A while back, I read Sylvia Day’s Afterburn and Aftershock (is it me or are they also two foul coloured spirits that you drink only when hammered in nightclubs?) The book was published by Mills & Boon, but in collaboration with Cosmo. The Cosmo collaboration is more than just their name on the cover, too. There’s some nice agony aunt (sorry, sexual psychotherapist) action at the back, as well as a bit of a Q&A with some big names in the sex writing scene (Zoe Margolis, Alissa Nutting, Cherry Healey…)  that’s framed as ‘Sex mistakes by the women who’ve made them.’ Which is a wonderfully sex positive slant to put on such advice as ‘I wish I’d known it’s ok to masturbate.’

For my sins, I quite like Sylvia Day’s writing. Sure, it’s undeniably trashy. Like E L James, she has pet turns of phrase and descriptions that she returns to time and again, which might not bother you that much for the first book, but which sure as hell do by the third. And yet, I romped through the first in the Crossfire series in a way that I just didn’t with FSoG. I think Afterburn and Aftershock are more problematic, at times: there’s a point at which the hero, having expressly been asked by the heroine to sleep elsewhere, crawls into her bed in the middle of the night, blatantly ignoring her wishes in a way that’s not domming, but just damn out of order.

But it’s Cosmo’s involvement that really riles me. Those of you who follow me on Twitter might have seen that last week I finally reached the end of my tether with both @Cosmopolitan and @Cosmopolitan_UK and unfollowed both on the basis it would make me happier. And you know what? It has. I don’t need yet another list post called ’24 things that are NOT vaginas, but really look like them’ and I certainly don’t need ‘9 reasons why he’s acting super distant.’

It’s sometimes hard, even as a sort-of sex blogger, to keep tabs on just how far behind the sex blogging community the real world’s attitudes to sex are. Sometimes, that can actually be a comfort: I have days when I really *am* vanilla, when I need to know that the whole world isn’t non-monogamous or kinking. But more often, it’s just a painful reminder of why hard copy erotica doesn’t sell, of why list posts rule the internet, and actually, why feminism still has so far to go.

When I was fourteen, my local newsagent used to ID girls buying Cosmo, like some kind of self-appointed moral guardian of the realm. It was, he claimed ‘too full of sex,’ to be suitable for teenagers. Perhaps back then, in the 90s, it really was groundbreaking, although I doubt it somehow. It just makes me so depressed that in 2014, the questions Cosmo is still asking and answering at the back of a chart bestseller are ‘Will I ever orgasm?’ ‘Am I weird because I like porn?’ and of course, not forgetting ‘his’ question: ‘I fantasise about having sex with a strap on. I fancy women, so I’m not gay, but am I abnormal?’

There’s one thing both guys and gals could do with learning from Cosmo: it’s never going to help you feel more normal.

Damaged heroes and tea-swilling heroines

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So, by my calculations there are 7 days and oh, 12 blog posts left until the end of October. And I really want to hit the full 31 posts because I have a bit of a project that I want to launch on November 1st and I’m only going to do it if I complete the blog posting challenge successfully.

With that in mind, missing this week’s Wicked Wednesday was a slight disaster.

It sort of took me by surprise, even though I’d been thinking about the prompt since a conversation I had with Kristina Lloyd at her book launch last Saturday night. Well, sort of. It actually also ties in really nicely with something I’ve been thinking about since I went to a couple of events at the Cheltenham literature festival at the beginning of the month.

Anyway, let’s start with the prompt. I feel a little guilty saying this, but drunk, rambling man in a bar feels a bit cliche to me. Or rather, it feels cliche, but also an entirely feasible situation with which to start a story.

Back, briefly to the literature festival. The first talk I went to was this, on the ‘Rise of the anti-heroine.’ Although I fully recognise that feminism still has a long way to go, and that men and women are far from equal, I’m always stunned as to how much this affects women in fields like literature. It’s supposedly harder to get published if you’re a woman, something which kind of makes sense when you look at things like the statistics behind ‘The Year of Reading Women.’

I have a handful of notes from that evening – one of which just says ‘relatable, likeable.’ Another is a quote from Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, which i failed to copy down exactly but is something along the lines of ‘Feminism is the ability to have female characters who are bad.’ One of the authors on the panel said that women writing chick lit are told that their female characters must be the kinds of women you’d want to sit and drink tea with. I think that’s meant to mean ‘sweet and nice’ – in short, the kind of women I personally loathe spending time with. I’m pretty flawed and I like to spend my time, both when I’m reading and in real life, with women who are equally so. Which is probably why I haven’t read chick lit for years. Someone else said that what we refer to as ‘the anti heroine,’ if it was a male character would simply be referred to as realistic and interesting.

I finished The Lemon Grove back in August, and so I asked Helen Walsh about her portrayal of anal sex in the novel, which caused a bit of a stunned silence, but hey, I can handle that. More specifically, what I asked was ‘Is an openness and a love of sex for the sake of sex a characteristic of the anti-heroine?’ The answer was pretty much ‘Yes.’ So you can imagine my joy when, after I’d asked that question, a middle-aged man (in a mainly female audience) asked for the mic and posed the question ‘Why does writing strong women have to mean writing about sex?’ I gave him side-eyes, but I don’t think he noticed. I can’t quite remember what the panel said, but my answer would be ‘Because for so long we haven’t been able to. So suck it up.’ As an aside though, things are hopefully changing. The boy walked in on me in the middle of reading that anal scene: when I asked him what he thought of it he said ‘You might want to use some lube, love.’ Which is definitely progress of a kind.

Let’s go back to men. Based on what I’ve said up till now, you’d think male characters have a much easier ride of it. After all, complex men are just realistic and interesting, right? Well, yes, up until the arrival of a certain billionaire (by the by, I was in WH Smith today and the covers in the erotica section are now literally fifty shades of grey. Who is still reading/publishing/buying these novels?)  Except it seems that in erotica, if you’re writing men  who have much growth/self-discovery to do as the heroine, men who are still learning about/discovering their own desires and men who make (sometimes pretty awful) mistakes as a result of that, those men are automatically ‘damaged.’ I call bullshit. *That’s* equality – learning about sex, about desire, about what turns us on and off, about sometimes misjudging things is something we all do, not because we’re male or female, but because we’re human. Those are the kind of men I want to read, and more importantly the kind I want to write. The photo at the top of this post is my notes from feedback from my writing group: at the top right it says ‘Neither character has proper character arc; he’s on the margins; entire relationship is a projection onto him.’ Those things are top of my list of things to fix. Because I don’t want cardboard cutout men, or women who are dependent on those men for everything they discover about sex. Real men do get drunk and messy in bars. So do real women. Life is messy. Fiction should be too.

Kristina Lloyd’s Undone: the ‘unsuitable for Amazon’ review

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My copy of Undone arrived with strict instructions from the author herself:

‘Promise that you’ll read it in order.’

Well, of course, Kristina. How else would I read it? Do I look like the kind of person who trawls books looking for an immaculately written blow job or any hint of anal? Maybe don’t answer that.

Kristina has her reasons for not trusting me. Her second novel, Asking for Trouble, is my favourite erotica novel ever. It never leaves my bedside table, and it rarely leaves my actual bed. I lent it to the boy when I wanted him to understand what turns me on. I use it when I need reminding how to write well. It’s a superb work of erotica, but it more than holds its own as a piece of fiction outside of the genre. It’s taught me how to write characters, how to describe place … wait, I’m reviewing the wrong book.

Anyway. Asking for Trouble is the reason Kristina doesn’t trust me. When we first started chatting via Twitter, I confessed that I’d owned it for months, years even, before I fully pieced the plot together. Why? Because the sex in it is so hot that I’d been ‘reading’ (wanking over) the sex scenes time and time again, and figuring out the plot using a mixture of guesswork and logical deduction. That’s how you have great orgasms. It’s *not* how you read a book.

So, good girl that I am, I obediently started Undone at the beginning. Like, right at the beginning. With the dedication.

I’m not totally sure what the etiquette is regarding mentioning the dedication in a review. It sort of feels like it’s not fair game because it’s not part of the story: the story is *not* about Kristina’s life, the dedication presumably *is.* But anyway, here’s what it says:

For Ewan, for being generous with the measures.

For that to make sense, you kind of have to know that the book is set in a cocktail bar, and, bad reviewer that I am, I haven’t filled you in on the plot. But the cocktails aren’t really my point. Lana and Sol, the characters in Undone, aren’t Kristina and (presumably) her partner. What they do have though is affection and respect for each other that underpins all the sex in the book and proves the publishing industry wrong about everything it holds true about erotic romance. And for me, the stunning simplicity with which Kristina writes emotion and affection is captured wholeheartedly in that dedication.

Unlike most of what Black Lace publish these days, Undone is described as ‘erotic thriller,’ rather than ‘erotic romance.’ It really, really bothers me that we’ve come to understand erotic romance as being synonymous with billionaires, helicopters and fifteen-million page contracts. The reason I picked the dedication as an example of Kristina being so much more than just a sex writer is because it’s too hard to pull out an individual quote from the novel itself that proves that this is romance too: the whole text is shot through with the depth of Sol and Lana’s feelings for one another.

Not that those feelings cast any kind of soft focus glow over the sex scenes. When I first started reading Kristina’s work, I picked it up by chance: in those days I’d read pretty much any Black Lace book. Since then, I’ve learnt a lot more about my own kinks and consequently, become a lot more discerning in what I read, erotica-wise. Even in a year and half’s worth of blogging I’ve discovered that I’m not as vanilla as I thought I was: I identify as submissive far more strongly than I did at the start, but I know more about what kind of sub I am, too. What I’d call ‘formalised kink’ – beautiful rope work, toys, spankings, the word ‘Sir’ – none of that really works for me. I like improvised bondage, bruising, shame – and Undone is very much about the last of those things. Not that it doesn’t have stunning S&M kit in it – Kristina has certainly done her research into handcuffs – but it feels much more about the psychological aspects of kink than her last novel, Thrill Seeker, did.

It’s a massively intelligently-written book, but if I flick through my copy now and find the bits I underlined, it’s the visceral quality of the sex that means I’ll probably return to this as wank-fodder almost as often as I do to Asking for Trouble. Again, it’s difficult to the pluck the best bits out of context, but I particularly loved the following:

Specks of purple and green glitter shone where he’d rubbed against my make-up. I thought of the ways in which we become each other’s bodies, how a punch becomes a bruise, how fluids mingle in kisses and how I take him inside me, the boundaries of our selves no longer sealed and whole.

And then, a little later, this:

He raised himself over me, his cock bumping at my entrance. He grabbed my wrist, pinning my arm awkwardly above my head as he drove into me. His bulky shaft pushed me open, my heavy, wet insides clinging to his thickness. I cried out, as thrilled by the hand squeezing my arm as I was by the cock surging into me. He shoved high and hard, his fingers tight around my wrist.

So, do I recommend it? Hell yes. But do yourself a favour and take Kristina’s advice. Read Undone in order, as much for the thriller plot as for the sex. Don’t look for (or post!) spoilers on Amazon. It’s better that way. If you must know though, the super hot anal starts on page 221.

Guest Post: Kristina Lloyd’s Main Man

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It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Kristina Lloyd’s fiction. I love her writing style, her unashamedly hardcore approach to erotica, and perhaps most of all, her male characters. Which is why I’m delighted to have her here today to talk about the hero of her new novel, Undone. Over to you, Kristina…

Undone Kristina Lloyd

My new novel, Undone, is set in a cocktail bar, and the main man is Sol Miller. Several months into writing the book, it was pointed out to me I’d named him after two brands of beer. I swear this wasn’t intentional! I briefly considered changing his name but by then it was too late. He was Sol Miller through and through.

Sol is a Jewish ex-New Yorker , now resident in the UK. I wanted him to have an ordinary, American name so spent time diligently researching common Jewish names before, yup, inadvertently naming him after a couple of lagers. In the current erotica publishing climate, Sol is perhaps unusual because he’s not a billionaire. (I’m sure I’m not the only person with zero erotic interest in wealth.) He’s a former IT guy, taking a step back from a stressful career and doing casual labour at a building site in Saltbourne, the town where my protagonist, Lana Greenwood, has her cocktail bar.

I love writing about mysterious, possibly dangerous men, and creating female characters willing to play with fire. Lana meets Sol at a weekend party in a manor house. While drinking in the garden with friends, she’s directed indoors to fetch another bottle of wine. Here’s a brief excerpt where Lana describes their first meeting:

“The stone utility room was cool and shadowy, an Aladdin’s cave of alcohol. Sunlight filtered in through a small, grimy window, casting a meagre sheen on kegs, crates and exotic, multi-coloured bottles. I blinked as my eyes readjusted, goosebumps stippling my bare arms.

In the veiled light, a shirtless man stood before a tall American fridge, head bowed. He rested one hand on the matte silver door, while the other angled a pint glass at the ice dispenser. He wore canvas knee-lengths, slung low on his hips, and his dark, sweat-soaked hair was hooked behind his ears. He was powerfully muscular but not unnaturally chiseled, and a small roll of softness edged his waist. Ice cubes clattered into the glass. The bars of his ribs pumped below wet spikes of hair in the pit of his raised arm. His torso glistened, a soft curve of light resting on one shoulder. Beads of sweat trickled down his chest . A couple of droplets fell, making dark spots on the flagstones.

I shivered. Laughter and the clink of glasses from outside grew faint, as if I were sinking under water, the world fading out of reach. He stood straight, glancing at me. For an instant, the light around him was magical, a diaphanous haze pricked with glittering motes. His chest hair was plastered to his body, and his lower lip was smeared with blood, a glossy violet bulge distorting its shape.

‘You see any cloths around here?’ His accent was American, a sexy, sonorous drawl, and a  slight slur marred his words. He stepped into shadow and slid open a flaky, wooden door beneath an old Belfast sink. He bobbed down to peer in, holding the sink above for balance. Down his left side, from underarm to hip, was a tattoo unlike any I’d seen before. To be accurate, there were several tattoos but they formed a picture, or a panel, depicting a stemmed dandelion head gone to seed. The images were as delicately rendered as etchings under tissue paper in a botanical encyclopaedia. Single, fluffy orbs drifted from the spiky round flower, as if a breeze were blowing tattoos across his body. I half wanted to reach out and catch one, then I could make a wish.”

Lana and Sol exchange only a few words but Lana immediately thinks she’s got him sussed: simple, straightforward, sporty, fun. Not her type at all. She’s forced to reevaluate her opinion when she hooks up with him and another guy, Misha, for a threesome. She starts to suspect there’s more to Sol than meets the eye, especially on the morning after when Misha is discovered dead in the swimming pool. Lana has reason to believe Sol may be implicated in the death. She knows the wisest thing would be to steer clear of him but she’s finding him increasingly hot and intriguing. So of course, she follows her groin rather than her head. And I totally would, too!

If you’d like to know more about Undone, please hop over to my blog for an excerpt, and check out the other stops on my Sexy September blog tour.

 

Kristina Lloyd writes erotic fiction about sexually submissive women who like it on the dark, dirty and dangerous side. Her novels are published by Black Lace and her short stories have appeared in dozens of anthologies, including several ‘best of’ collection, in both the UK and US. She lives in Brighton, England.

About Undone

When Lana Greenwood attends a glamorous house party she finds herself tempted into a ménage à trois. But the morning after brings more than just regrets over fulfilling a fantasy one night stand. One of the men she’s spent the night with is discovered dead in the swimming pool. Accident, suicide or murder, no one is sure and Lana doesn’t know where to turn. Can she trust Sol, the other man, an ex-New Yorker with a dirty smile and a deep desire to continue their kinky game?

Undone is published on Sept 11th, 2014. Pre-order with Amazon: Amazon UK paperback :: Amazon UK Kindle :: Amazon US Kindle :: Amazon CA paperback :: Amazon CA Kindle

Cream doesn’t rise: the state of UK erotica

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Publishing has a reputation for being pretty cushy: reasonable working hours, long, boozy lunches, fannying around with the press releases…

Last week, I took my full lunch break twice. I went out with colleagues, and had wine with my meal. Why? Because a new Carluccio’s had opened round the corner and you could eat on the house while they trained their staff. And who wouldn’t say yes to free pasta, right?

It’s not the done thing. I have colleagues who never take lunch. Most people stay late. Publishing is, in theory, as commercial and competitive as any other industry.

Why ‘in theory?’ Because it’s also astonishingly reactive. And not in a good way.

Of course, things move forward. But god, they move slowly. We’d been listening to music on portable devices, using digital cameras and buying increasingly sophisticated mobile phones for years before the Kindle came along. Many publishing companies are struggling to come up with a long-term digital strategy: those that have are often big companies buying up smaller companies with both the entrepreneurship and the agility to push the envelope. The rest wait and see what they do and then follow in their footsteps.

Why is this? Honestly, I don’t know. Perhaps because people in the industry – myself included – often have a deeply romantic view of books. We do what we do, partly at least, for the satisfaction of advance copies landing on our desks – that fresh off the press smell, those uncracked spines, that sense that you’re still part of something that makes something tangible, something precious.

I wish, in fiction publishing, that that translated into the right books being published, the right books making it to the top of the bestseller lists. It doesn’t seem to, sadly. Fifty Shades of Grey (which was obviously where this post was going), is a very good example of increasingly commercial publishing: Vintage acquired the rights in March 2012, and the book was released for sale a month later. Given the hype around it at the time, the speed with which they turned it round makes much better business sense than what most people wish they’d done with it: given it a decent edit.

When I first started thinking about this post, a few weeks back, I was planning a different angle. I was planning to defend FSoG.   Because so much of the backlash against it is aimed not at the publisher, nor at the retailers who gave it prime position in their stores, but at the women who chose to read it. When a film comes out and the whole world goes to see it, you don’t hear people saying, for example, ‘Oh, God, you went to see Bridesmaids?!’ The same can’t be said of books. Those of us who wrote FSoG off as both poor fiction and poor erotica, have often been guilty of shaming those who genuinely enjoyed it.

In the autumn after it came out, a friend and I went to a panel discussion at Cheltenham Literature Festival called Fifty Shades of Blue. The session was billed as follows:

Join Brooke Magnanti, author of the Belle de Jour books and The Sex Myth, poet Ruth Padel, author Bel Mooney and journalist Bidisha as they discuss the Fifty Shades phenomenon and each choose their own favourite erotica. Which pieces of erotic fiction do our panel rate and which do they hate?

I don’t recall a lot of what was said during that hour, but I do remember that the bit where the panel discussed their favourite erotica was pushed to the very end. And all but one of the panelists cited a ‘classic’ as their favourite: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Story of O… Even the one person who didn’t pick something literary (and I honestly can’t remember who said what) chose a Jilly Cooper novel.

Granted, by that point Black Lace had shut up shop and, I think, was yet to reopen for business. But I was still buying and reading good BL titles that I found in service stations and online, and it felt shortsighted of the panel to completely dismiss anything that classed itself as pure erotica. It was literary snobbery – a reluctance to admit that you got off to anything that you wouldn’t happily have on display in your living room. I felt, and I still feel, that attitudes like that are as harmful to the genre as low quality, high volume titles like FSoG.

Recently, similar discussions have been popping up again. Many erotica writers are being shoehorned towards a particular model designed to mirror FSoG: if they’re not writing erotic romance, it’s hard for them to place their book with a traditional publisher. Which is crazy. It’s been over 2 years: when will longer erotic fiction start to reflect the fact that erotica doesn’t have to ≠ BDSM-themed romance? I like my erotica BDSM-flavoured, and it still drives me crazy!

When I first started learning to write, one of the things my writing teacher was keen to emphasise was that it’s hard to sell a book which classifies itself purely as contemporary fiction. A book is easier to market if you can compare it to something else: whose work is it like? What genre is it? Is it the new Fifty Shades, the new Gone Girl, the new Twilight? It bothered me, and it still does, a bit, not so much in relation to my own writing, but in relation to my own reading: how would I ever discover truly original new authors if everyone was being forced to compare themselves to someone else?

Part of the problem with erotica, perhaps, is that it hasn’t yet learnt to compare itself with books which, while not erotic, nonetheless share a sub-genre. Last Christmas, Kristina Lloyd recommended Elizabeth Haynes’ Into the Darkest Corner to me as a holiday read. I loved it, and when I came back I told her that, via Twitter. The author, copied into the tweets, joined the conversation.

Then, a few months later, she followed and DMed me to say she liked my blog. Obviously, I was thrilled: the author of a bestselling novel was enjoying stuff that I’d written. We had a couple of conversations and I ended up recommending Kristina’s second novel, Asking for Trouble, as I do to anyone who bothers to ask me what my favourite books are. A few weeks later, she tweeted the following:

It is, as Kristina said at the time, pretty unusual for someone outside of the genre to lavish praise on an erotic novel, no matter how good it is. But to me, this is how it should be: authors and reviewers of genre-fiction (and non-genre fiction) recognising erotica as they would any other genre, erotic novels being sold on the shelves alongside all other fiction, rather than squirrelled away in a dusty corner under the escalators (no matter how much that dusty corner turns me on), being part of the 3 for 2s, not having their designated shelf space slowly eroded over time. Only then will things start to change.

Cream doesn’t rise, said someone (non-euphemistically!) in a discussion about erotica the other day. No, perhaps not. But I sure as hell hope we find a way to make it float.

Polished: Entries

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It’s just gone midnight UK time, and as someone pointed out that I wasn’t specific about timezone in the competition rules, it remains open until morning. I’ll post links to additional entries as and when I receive them. For now though, here are the (very impressive) entries so far…

Thanks to everyone who joined in!

Charlie x

Speed dial by @codexonline

Innocent by @HornyGeekGirl

Lincoln Park in the dark by @JillyBoyd

Cherry Blossom by @FSolomonRR

Perfectly Yummy by @IAmAnnaSky

Over the edge by @The_Lady_Sybil

Pedicure by @MSM1647

Marrakech by @Juniper3Glasgow

Eternal Optimist by @EA_Unadorned

Polished: NEW RULES

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10

A few weeks back I posted this – a bit of fun and a way to get some much needed (for me at least) writing inspiration.

Since then, a few people have contacted me and said they’d like to join in, but for various reasons were wary or unable to: they didn’t want to give out their address or they lived overseas, to name just a couple.

So, because it’s my game, I’m changing the rules. The original suggestion still stands, and if you’d like to send/be sent an actual nail polish you have until midnight tonight to DM or email me to let me know. You can find the full rules on the original post.

However, if the idea appeals but the format puts you off, here are two alternatives:

Alternative 1

Drop me an email or a DM and I will pick, at random, one of my many nail polishes and email you its name. You then write a story that references the nail polish name in some way. You can request a polish name any time between now and the 27th July.

Alternative 2

You pick one of your own nail polish colours and write a story that references that nail polish name in some way.

Now with prizes…

Originally, I said this wasn’t a competition and there wouldn’t be any prizes. I’ve since changed my mind. Anyone who writes a nail polish themed story and publishes it on their blog/sends me the link before midnight on July 27th will be eligible to win a copy of my favourite erotica anthology. That applies no matter where in the world you live.

*UPDATE* Since I posted this earlier, the lovely Kristina Lloyd has contacted me to say that she’ll send the winner a copy of her new novel Undone, before its official UK release date. She’s also offered to kill the winner if they subsequently post spoilers.

Any questions, let me know…

Polished

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11

Back in December 2011, I joined in with the Curiosity Project – a blog swap project where your details and a list of your likes/dislikes are sent to another participating blogger and they send you a shoe box full of stuff they think you’ll like. In return, you do the same for another randomly allocated person.

The project has been on hold for a while, and although it’s due to restart soon, I miss getting exciting mail. So, in the words of Carrie Bradshaw, I got to thinking…

In March this year, Kristina Lloyd ran an excellent erotica workshop about how to spark up ideas for flash fiction pieces. Her suggestion? Nail polishes have cool names, so why not pick a colour name at random, brainstorm its associations and use it as the basis for a short story?

I keep meaning to give it a go, and then never quite getting round to it.

So, with kind permission from Kristina, here’s what I’m proposing:

If you’re a UK-based erotica writer (I would love to make this worldwide, but British postal regulations on nail polish are ridiculously tight) and you’d like some inspiration, I’m proposing a polish swap.

You send me your address and I match you randomly with another person. That person will send you a nail polish which you then use to inspire a piece of erotica/a blog post/–a short story in another genre. In return, you send out a polish to another participant.

Hopefully that makes sense, but to clarify:

The Rules…

(1) Email your name/pseudonym and full address, including a postcode, to sexblogofsorts@gmail.com before midnight on July 11th.
(2) Your name will be put into a hat and each participant will be drawn a secret recipient to send their nail polish to.
(3) You will receive an email with your recipients name and address on July 12th.
(4) You purchase a nail polish of your choice and send it to your recipient before July 18th. Because of the previously mentioned mailing regulations, please read this to make sure you’ve packaged/labelled your nail polish correctly.
(5) Please make sure the polish you choose has a name – it’s not much fun if someone gets a polish called ‘112.’ Good sources of relatively cheap polishes with good names are Maybelline and Rimmel 60 second.
(6) When you receive your nail polish, write a short piece of erotica/a blog post/a short story in another genre, inspired by its name. It’s up to you whether you share the story on your blog, but I will link to anyone who sends me details of their story once its written. There is no minimum/maximum work count for your story – it’s totally up to you.
(7) Hopefully it goes without saying, but this is open to both men and women.
(8) Your personal details will be forwarded only once to your secret project partner. Your information will not be shared with anyone else. If, however, someone does not receive a polish, I will send on the email address of their sender so that they can contact them and find out what happened to their parcel.
(9) This isn’t a competition – it’s just a bit of fun and an excuse to write something new. No winners, no prizes – sorry!

If I’ve missed anything, or you have questions, please let me know…

I’m excited!