Day Two of winning fabulous prizes, people!
Happy 2nd birthday to Evernight Publishing! And to celebrate, they’ve whipped up a scorchingly good scavenger hunt. Today’s hunting ground is Sizzling Hot Book Reviews — go forth and hunt!
This is what I love about having friends all over the place
I can find out that one’s going to Berlin, ask her to take pictures and do a bit of research for me, and when she says yes I can offer jokingly to Tuckerise her in Behind the Iron Cross (except that it’s a smutfest, I inform her, and she probably wouldn’t go for it), and when she disagrees and says that yes, she’d love to be immortalized as a kinky chanteuse, it inspires an entire scene in the book that not only promotes the industrial espionage subplot but also leads to one of the most deliciously filthy sex scenes I have ever written.
So, yeah, thanks, KM!
Six Sentence Sunday: Behind the Iron Cross
Yes, angels, it’s Six Sentence Sunday, that time of the week when I join in with hundreds of other writers to blog six playful sentences from one of our works. This snippet really isn’t all that playful, but I think it’s a nice piece of character exposition and I’m rather proud of it.
Some background: after Friedrich’s first night with Kat and Sam, he heads home in the rain to the desultory working-class neighborhood of Friedrichshain, where he runs into a prostitute trying to hustle up rent money. When he turns her down, she opens her coat, exposing a pregnant belly, and offers to have sex with him for fifty cents (in Weimar Berlin Münzis, or pregnant prostitutes, were an exotic specialty and charged more than the average streetwalker, but she complains bitterly that the bitches won’t let her work their street). Saddened, he fishes an American dime, part of his own whoring fee for the night, out of his pocket and presses it into her hand. She starts to say that it isn’t enough.
“No, just — just take it. For the baby.”
He left her staring at the coin and started walking again. He still had the dollar, with a promise of more — he could spare a dime for a pregnant whore stuck out in the rain.
After all, he thought, they were both whores now. Nothing wrong with a little collegial assistance.
So, yeah, Berlin was pretty decadent
One of the things I love about writing historical stories is the research I get to do — I always wind up learning some fascinating stuff about the time period and the location. As it turns out, apparently I’m pretty damned good at extrapolating events, as well — for BtIC, I bought Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin as source material, and much to my surprise some of the stuff that I’d made up for the purposes of the story (e.g. Friedrich’s nephew has weak lungs and their doctor recommends that he be removed from the “tainted air” of Berlin before he dies from it, hence Friedrich’s need to make money fast) have a basis in fact. Apparently Berlin was built on a swamp, and didn’t have the greatest air quality in Germany. That being said, Berlin air was also slightly alkaline and considered to possess an amphetamine-like effect, not something you necessarily want a frail 18-month-old breathing. Talk about serendipity.
Oh, and yeah, in case there was any doubt Berlin was a total and utter fleshpot — you could get absolutely anyone or anything you wanted for a few American dollars, flamboyant homosexuality was welcomed and celebrated (apparently being a lesbian was very fashionable), and the BDSM scene was very active and a big attraction for tourists and locals like. So now you know.
In any case, I’m wading through Chapter Three, and I’m having far, far too much fun writing about Weimar-era Berlin and my poor ex-army colonel, who just found out to his shock that, um, he kind of likes being spanked. What a fascinating time.
NSFW Snippet: Behind the Iron Cross
You’ve been such sweethearts, and I’ve been slaving away on this all weekend, so I thought I’d treat you to the opening scene from the current WIP, Behind The Iron Cross. 1920’s Berlin, BDSM, and MMF menáges — oh my!
“Tiffany Reisz is my master now.”
If you do not know who Tiffany Reisz is, stop reading this right now and go to her website, click on the Bedtime Story Blog link, and read some of her work. I’ll wait.
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Got your breath back and changed your underwear? Good. Now that you have a better idea of who this little Scotch pepper of a writer is, you’ll understand why her Original Sinners series is to 50 Shades of Grey what truffles are to tree fungus. Published by Harlequin MIRA, the first Original Sinners book, The Siren, introduces us to Nora Sutherlin, a dominatrix/writer/force of nature who wants to make it out of the “smut” genre and go big with her latest novel. In order to do that, however, she needs to get hard-assed British editor Zach Easton to agree to edit her novel — and he doesn’t like erotica or erotica writers.
As if that wasn’t difficult enough, Nora also has a gorgeous, virginal live-in intern named Wesley who complicates her life with his innate decency and quiet love for her (but he won’t go to bed with her). Oh, and her lover/former dom/scariest man in NYC Søren wants her back, but can’t engage in a public relationship with her for the best of reasons. With three stunning, damaged, amazing men like this in her life, what the hell’s a writer to do?
To find out, just go to Amazon or B&N and get The Siren and The Angel, the second book in the series (there are three more coming, according to Tiffany). I swear on Anaïs Nin’s grave, you won’t regret it.
Sale!
Just found out from Evernight Publishing that they bought “Tied With a Bow” for their Christmas Manlove antho! More details when I get them, but this will become a must-buy item on all your Christmas shopping lists, sweeties!
Six Sentence Sunday: Tied With a Bow
Yes, angels, it’s Six Sentence Sunday, that time of the week when I join in with hundreds of other writers to blog six playful sentences from one of our works. This week, I’m picked the freshly-minted short story “Tied With a Bow,” about a shy bookstore owner who writes scorching smut on the side, and the upstairs neighbors who find out about his secret kink and offer to indulge him, which I will be sending off to a chipper Christmas-themed erotica anthology in the next few days once I get responses from my beta readers. And now, here’s Paul, my shy bookstore owner/author, whose bedroom is right under his neighbors/crushes’ bedroom and gets to listen in to their romps whether he likes it or not…
What was it like, having sex with someone you loved? He’d never thought about having a threesome before Tim and Rory, but now…
He could imagine Tim on his hands and knees, saying something sweet and filthy over his shoulder as Rory fucked him. Or he could be on his back, legs hitched over the taller man’s shoulders. Or maybe the smaller man was the top, holding Rory braced against their headboard as he fucked deeply into his husband’s ass. He could almost see the redhead’s arms outstretched, holding onto the bedposts as if they were tied there, moaning helplessly at every thrust.
*pinches bridge of nose, sighs*
As a writer, I’m of the firm belief that I should read extensively in my field in order to know what’s popular, what’s not, and how best to entertain my audience when I write a story. (Of course, I also read outside my field so that I’m exposed to new concepts and don’t get boring as fuck, but that will be a topic for another post.). As a result, I’ve got one hell of a big library, both hardcopy and electronic, which includes a wide variety of SF, mystery, and erotic romance novels.
The electronic library is fairly new and is primarily erotic romance, mainly because of two things that happened at the same time — 1) I finally decided to load the Kindle app onto my iPad and 2) I discovered Bookstrand.com. As a result, I wound up buying a lot of ER novels over the last couple of months, both for pleasure and to study the field as I started writing in it. Some of these novels are by amazing writers such as Tymber Dalton (I cheerfully admit that I’ve got about half of her backlist on my iPad right now, and I plan on buying the rest as treats for myself when I hit certain writing goals), and they are a delight to read.
And then there are the ER writers, some of them mightily prolific, who…well, let’s be honest. They really, really need to work on their dialogue. There’s one series in particular that’s a guilty pleasure for me because I happen to enjoy the worldbuilding and the hot man-on-man action, but oh my sweet Fanny Adams the characters’ dialogue literally has me squirming in my seat, and not in the fun tingly way. Look, if you have two gorgeous wranglers ready to tear off their jeans and make with the sweet Alpha/beta man love, you expect them to sound…well, like guys in heat. Which is to say, grunts, moans, and sighed phrases along the lines of, “Oh, fuck, baby, your ass is so tight.” When they sound more like pedantic female English professors, it pours ice water on what should be a smoking hot scene and yanks me right out of the story.
That isn’t to say that a writer needs to be restricted to a certain class of words while writing a sex scene — I’ve read some pyroclastically hot stuff that never once named body parts. If a writer doesn’t want to use terms like cock, cunt, or asshole, that’s fine — different strokes and all that. Nonetheless, I damn well expect said writer to write dialogue appropriate to a character’s gender, social class and educational level, and if that character would say something like, “Get your ass in the air so I can fuck it nice and slow, baby,” then the writer had best pull on their Big Kid panties and use the appropriate words, or start writing in another genre. I mean, really, does anyone think that a big hairy-chested rancher who’s also an Alpha shifter would say, “Present to me — I want to view you”? (No, that’s not a real line of dialogue. Or at least I hope it isn’t.)
Don’t know what your cowboy would say? Rent some Westerns. Hang out at a kicker bar and eavesdrop. Go browse the local gear store and keep an ear out for conversations. That goes for any character — cops don’t talk like construction workers, professors don’t talk like engineers, etc. Do a little research, get a feel for how people talk. Just because characters are fucking like bunnies in Viagra is no reason to get sloppy with their creation and development.
Really, I don’t ask for much in exchange for my $6. Hell, I can even live with the gross overuse of the whole “you are my destined mate” trope if the sex is hot enough and I care about the characters. But please don’t make your cowboys sound like dowager duchesses — it just ain’t right.
Nicola Cameron Writes 