Wednesday 30 April 2014

Win Never Say Never


Look - my beautiful contributor copies of Never Say Never: tips, tricks and erotic inspiration for lovers (ed. Alison Tyler) have arrived!

Would you like one?

Here's the blurb:
"Monogamy does NOT have to equal monotony and eroticist author Alison Tyler has made it her life's mission to make sure it never is with Never Say Never! Half of a very happily married duo, Tyler's advice is that couples can build a trust level that makes experimentation truly possible and posits that uninhibited, really exciting, and highly imaginative sex happens best with lovers who just happen to be couples, too. This follow up to Tyler's bestselling Never Have the Same Sex Twice blends her wisdom, expert advice, and favorite erotic scenarios illustrating myriad sexual techniques and fantasies designed to liven up the bedroom."

And here's how to win:
Take a look at the full chapter/theme lineup from 1 - voyeurism thru 15 - femme domme.
By my reckoning, I've written about all those kinks at one time or another (some of them lots of times!) in my various short stories and novels. All but one.

Which of those kinks have I not written about yet? Take a guess, and leave a comment here. For example, if you think I've never written a voyeurism scene (though that'd be pretty dumb since my story Wherever I Wander kicks off the book!) then comment - "voyeurism". Easy, huh? You've got a week! If there's more than one right answer then I'll put names into a hat.

NB: I've got a spam filter running on this blog so your comment won't appear immediately, not until I've okayed it. If you came here via one of my Facebook posts you can leave your answer in the comments there, should you prefer.

Monday 28 April 2014

Eyecandy Monday


If I was basing today's Eyecandy on my current preoccupations, she'd be up a ladder sawing bits off trees. I just couldn't find a picture for that, doubtless due to health 'n'safety considerations, so this is a picture with no point ...

Just stripes ;-)

Friday 25 April 2014

Phenology - April

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. 
T.S. Eliot - The Waste Land

Lilac coming into flower today, 25th April
April in England is the month when everything changes.
Suddenly all the soft ground vegetation and the grasses start to sprout, and the grey hawthorn hedges are green again, almost overnight:


Trees start to come cautiously into leaf - starting with elder...


And alder ...



And birch...

And the crumpled leaves of horse chestnut:


Wild cherry is in blossom:


Along with the acid-green flowers of Norway maple:


As the daffodils die off slowly, their place on the roadsides is taken by swathes of yellow dandelions, racing to do their thing before the Council ride-on mowers get them:


While in secret corners you can find cowslips:



And blue forget-me-nots:
 

There are spring lambs in the fields (though not round where I live), and gosling families on the river:


And itty bitty baby calves, cute as puppies:


The Romans gave this month the Latin name Aprilis, from the verb aperire, "to open," an allusion to the trees and flowers beginning to "open up". Everything is coming back to life.

And I love it :-)

Wednesday 23 April 2014

Fundraiser

What is more nerve-racking than learning a new computer skill for a publisher? Learning how to video yourself and then doing your first ever promo video, that's what!

Everybody hates the sound of their own voice on tape, I know!

Sweetmeats Press, a small but perfectly formed and beautifully independent erotica press based in the UK, is doing a fundraising drive in order to help with getting its books onto shelves in the United States. Donors get gifts of course: $5 will see you with three e-short stories OR a full-length e-novel from the back catalogue - which is better than you'll find on Amazon -  and so on.

All support gratefully received.

Here's my video, complete with little Leonidas watching over me...


Monday 21 April 2014

Eyecandy Monday - knickers


Time for another micro-fetish. You know what else I like as well as men in towels?


Knickers.

Knickers caught in the act of coming off.


Sorry, I should call them "panties " because otherwise my American readers won't understand.


Although "panties" sounds pretentious to Brit ears ... and "knickers" sounds silly and childish.


There is no good word for the things.


*Sighs*
The trials of being a smutwriter :-)

Sunday 20 April 2014

Because she knows some frightful fiend...



Isn't this just the coolest thing? I am chuffed to bits! Jo's daughter painted me a piece of art after hearing that I like "monsters, and the woods, and creepy things". I don't know if it shows up in the photo but it depicts a wood at night, and at the end of a blood-red path a black horned figure stands in wait for the hapless traveller, whilst overhead great green eyes stare down menacingly.

It reminds me so much of this :-)

A
And it's 3D!

It's AWESOME!!!
THANK YOU!

:-D

Friday 18 April 2014

Mine's a latte

Since it's Good Friday I thought I'd blog something spiritually uplifting and not even slightly pervy. So I give you ...


The Miraculous Lactation of Saint Bernard!

The story is that St Bernard of Clairvaux was praying before a statue of Mary and as he spoke the line "Show me you are a mother," the statue came to life and squirted milk - with impressive accuracy - onto his face. Sometimes it's said it hit him in the eyes and cured an eye infection, other times it's said it got him in the open mouth to quench his parched lips.

St Bernard was one of the big influences behind both the disastrous Second Crusade and the rise of Marianism in the medieval Catholic Church. He was a big fan of the lactating Mary, and once had a nice dream about her sticking her boob in his mouth, when he nodded off during prayer:




I am of course fully aware that, theologically speaking, Mary's breast milk represents charity and intercessory grace - nothing sexual. Just as I am totally sure that neither the painters, nor the clients who commissioned any of these expensive works of art showing a lovely young woman with her tits out, had anything in mind but the purest of motives.

So there.

I'm not going to point out that the model for this painting was the king's mistress

Wednesday 16 April 2014

Out now - Never Say Never

New short story published this week!


Never Say Never, edited by Alison Tyler, is the follow-up to her Never Have the Same Sex Twice. It's a mixture of sex-advice and short stories designed to provide inspiration and entertainment.

Here's the blurb:
Monogamy does NOT have to equal monotony and eroticist author Alison Tyler has made it her life's mission to make sure it never is with Never Say Never! Half of a very happily married duo, Tyler's advice is that couples can build a trust level that makes experimentation truly possible and posits that uninhibited, really exciting, and highly imaginative sex happens best with lovers who just happen to be couples, too. This follow up to Tyler's bestselling Never Have the Same Sex Twice blends her wisdom, expert advice, and favorite erotic scenarios illustrating myriad sexual techniques and fantasies designed to liven up the bedroom.
Now, I'm not the world's greatest crusader for monogamy, for sure, but the theme of this volume is couples having fun together and I can certainly get behind that :-)


My story - the first in the book, yay! - illustrates the erotic possibilities of voyeurism and is called Wherever I Wander.

Here's the full lineup:

Chapter One: Watch This Way—Voyeurism
Wherever I WanderJanine Ashbless
Chapter Two: X Iis for Exposure—Exhibitionism
Bring Me the Dark • Angell Brooks
Chapter Three: Slippery When Wet—Cunnilingus
Savory • Georgia E. Jones
Chapter Four: Open Wide—Fellatio
 Allowed Charlotte Stein
Chapter Five: Close Your Eyes—Blindfolds
Blind LustKristina Lloyd
Chapter Six: Tied and Teased—Beginning Bondage
Silk Teresa Noelle Roberts
Chapter Seven: Naughty, Naughty—Spanking
 Beneath the SurfaceSommer Marsden
Chapter Eight: Fantasies First—Role- Play
Afternoon Strip • N. T. Morley
Chapter Nine: Back- Door Man—Anal
The Final FrontierJustine Elyot
Chapter Ten: Bend Over, B/F—Pegging
A Round Peg in a Round HoleShanna Germain
Chapter Eleven: Crossing Your T’s—Cross- Dressing
Tangled Up in Blue • Sophia Valenti
Chapter Twelve: Twist Me, Taunt Me, Turn Me On—Fetishes
The Silk Road * Donna George Storey
Chapter Thirteen: More the Merrier—Ménage
Margarita Magic • Thomas S. Roche
Chapter Fourteen: Trading Spouses—Soft Swapping
Syzygy Ashley Lister
Chapter Fifteen: Mind Your Ma’ams—Femme Domme
No Shame * Dante Davidson
Chapter Sixteen: 24/7—Living a Kinky Life
Is That Man Bothering You?Alison Tyler

And here's how Wherever I Wander starts - yes, your second excerpt in two days - and coincidentally the story features towels too!




“Hal!”

My shocked cry brought my husband out of our tiny en-suite into our cabin, a towel  wrapped about his hips. “What?” he asked.
    

“Phone home.” I didn't look up from our laptop screen. “Phone home now!”
    

“What's wrong?”
    

“Stacia—she's . . .”
    

He bounced onto the foot of the bed with me, to see what I was seeing. I was aware with some corner of my mind that he'd just emerged from the shower, and that he was still damp and scented with tea-tree body-wash. But most of my attention was on the WiFi feed running on my laptop screen.
   

“Oh . . .” he said.
     

Stacia was on the sofa—my sofa, strewn with the cushions I'd chosen—with a young man. They were kissing, passionately, and she had her blouse off to reveal a lacy bra and pillowy breasts. His hands were all over her, stroking and caressing, and although the live feed was silent, I had no difficulty hearing her mimed sighs and squeaks of pleasure in my head.
    

“I went online to check everything was all right back home,” I explained, aware that what I was doing might look a little like spying. “Look what she's doing! Ring her now!”
    

“Me?”
    

I cast him a hard glance. His own gaze was glued to the screen. “I can never work out your phone,” I complained, but it was an excuse and I knew it.
    

“And to say what?” he asked. 
    

“To stop what she's doing!” Which was, at that moment, pulling the boy's T-shirt off over his head.
   

“On what grounds? That we may have failed to mention the security cameras we installed to keep an eye on the house?”
   

“I said No Parties While We're Away!”
   

 “That's not a party, hon. That's one guy.”
    

Stacia rubbed her breasts against the boy's bare chest and bit his lip, drawing it out.
 

“They look like they're partying to me!”
    

“Well . . .” My husband shrugged. “We're paying her to be a house-sitter—not a nun.”
    

Once more I glanced sharply at him, wrinkling my nose. “They're doing it in our living room!”
    

“So you want to bill her for dry-cleaning the cushions, then?”



Never Say Never is on sale at Amazon US and coming soon at Amazon UK

Monday 14 April 2014

Eyecandy Monday - towels


I have a bit of thing about towels.



Cocks hidden under white towels, to be precise. It's not strong enough to be a kink, but it's definitely a fondness ...


I mean - look what fun guys can have!


So here's an excerpt from my vampire novel Red Grow the Roses, on the very subject:


Amanda.

Reynauld’s voice, in my head. My heart thumped.

The bathroom.

Moving quickly, I walked through the house. The marble-clad master bathroom was warm with steam as I entered, and the lights low. He stood with his back to me behind the layered arms of the glass screens, his head bowed and shoulders set angrily, outstretched fingertips on the polished black marble and the water running full-blast at the back of his neck. I watched the water swirl around his dark feet, running into the drain between them and carrying away the grime and the tension and the lust. I saw the way he rolled his shoulders under the flow, working each stubborn muscle. Inside me something clenched with an exquisite, tender pain.

How could my heart not melt for a man who craved a long hot shower?

I didn’t say anything. He knew I was there, and he would instruct me if he wished to. Instead I retrieved a fresh white towel from the cupboard and waited, watching him. I could follow the ebb of his anger by the way his shoulders slowly sagged, the way he finally moved to rub his neck and scalp, playing the water through his dark hair and then across his chest and down his torso. He soaped himself and I wished it were my hands massaging that body, my fingers chasing the suds cascading down his skin.
  
At last he turned off the water and stood there dripping, still facing the wall. I kicked off my heels and stepped between the arms of glass to hand him the towel, my eyes lingering on the water drops clinging to his skin, on the wet curls at the back of his head, on the runnels licking their way down his back and thighs. Reynauld wrapped the towel about his hips and tucked it in, then turned and set his back to the corner of the shower, leaning against the angled marble. His expression was haunted; he looked so weary and despairing that my heart felt like it would crack.
 
‘I handled that badly, didn’t I?’
  
What? I wanted to ask - You mean humiliating Naylor in front of everyone like that? Yes, I’d call that badly handled.
  
I shrugged one shoulder and did not answer.
  
‘I shouldn’t have lost my temper. He just makes me so angry. Why won’t he listen? - Is it so difficult to understand, what I’m trying to say?’
  
‘I think you should have killed him, to be honest. He’s a psychopath.’
  
‘We’re all killers.’ His voice was ragged.
  
That wasn’t what I’d meant, but I couldn’t argue with him. How can you possibly make a man twelve centuries older than you listen to a word you say? It’s bad enough with ordinary men – can you imagine a forty year old taking advice from a teenager of sixteen? Now try and grasp the gap between Reynauld and me. If I were like him, if I were knit of strength and night and savage need, then he might hear me. But I wasn’t, and never would be. I just looked at the water beaded on his bare chest and wanted in my frustration to strike him, to bruise him, to pin him to the wall and kiss him until he realised how much I loved him.
  
I think he saw the pain in my eyes, mirroring his own. With a curl of his fingers he gestured me closer and I dared to lay a hand on his bare chest. The feet of my stockings were soaked from the shower tray.
  
‘Oh Amanda,’ he whispered. He took my face tenderly in both hands, brushing his knuckles across my cheek, using his thumbs to stroke the paths of my bones. His eyes narrowed, his lips parting. I trembled, knowing that he could sense my desire: he’d be able to feel the race of my blood beneath his fingertips, hear my painfully pounding heart – and to smell the heat of my sex.
  
I was almost dancing against him now, making dark damp patches on my top as I pressed my breasts against his wet chest. Abandoning caution I reached to his crotch, to the layers of thick soft towelling and the unmistakable bulge of his hardening cock beneath. As I grabbed it he vented a groan. The towel began to slip from about his hips.
  
‘Oh God,’ I mumbled into his skin. ‘Oh God.’
  
When I lifted my burning face from his chest, the towel was no longer wrapped around his bare hips but hung from the erect baton of his cock, held there by my tight right hand. We both looked down at it, and I gave it a slow hard squeeze through the heavy towelling before letting the fabric slip to the floor. That turgid flesh didn’t yield at all. His cock was stiff once more, his balls riding high in a scrotum no longer soft and velvety but now tight and bulging. I brushed cock and balls with unsteady fingertips: he would take me now. He would take me and fuck me and bite me and that was exactly what I wanted.
  
‘Amanda...’ His voice was a whisper. He bit his own lip. The ache in his voice persuaded me to meet his gaze. ‘Would you...?’
  
No completion to that question. No words for what he wanted. Just his glance tentatively indicating his cock. My eyes widened as I understood, my heart kicking against my breastbone. In twenty-seven years he’d never asked this of me, and I’d never seen him ask or permit it of any woman. It wasn’t even thinkable. Vampires did not do that.
  
‘Reynauld?’
 
 He swallowed. ‘Please.’



Red Grow the Roses is available from Amazon UK and Amazon US
The e-book is currently only 49p!!

Sunday 13 April 2014

Naughty flowers!

Well, it's spring, so here are some gorgeous blooming plant genitalia for you...


I must logically assume that the Naked Man Orchid evolved that way in order to be fertilized by tiny fairy maidens...

Friday 11 April 2014

Cathar castles


The donjon of Arques castle.
Today - more photos from my long weekend in the South of France. We hired a car one day and went off looking for castles, and I've never seen anything quite like it! There are so many castles in the Languedoc region that they don't bother putting them all on maps - you drive past a cliff-face or a village and there'll be some ruined stronghold up there, ignored by everyone.

Peyrepertuse
As you can see, they dearly loved to put castles on cliffs. The more ridiculously precipitous the better.

Queribus

The area around Carcassonne is "Cathar country", and many of the castles (or earlier versions of them) were used as Cathar boltholes during the Albigensian Crusades (1209-1229)*

the "Cathar Castles"
This is Quéribus - it is so bijou and cute you could imagine it as a holiday home.


And you can see your enemies coming for miiiiiiles!



But even that pales into insignificance compared to the location of Peyrepertuse, which sits on a knife-edge limestone ridge:

Looking east along the ridge

Looking west along the ridge
It was the quietest eyrie ever. No traffic noises, no birdsong, no aircraft - and in March, only one other set of tourists. I fell in love with the place.

We only managed to get a close look at three castles in that day. I would certainly go back in order to do more! It's an extraordinary landscape, even discounting all the crummy New-Age / Holy Blood and the Holy Grail / Dan Brown / Kate Mosse fantasy that's built up around it. lots of history, lots of atmosphere, lots of wide open space.




 * A quick 'n' dirty guide to Catharism: It was a quasi-Christian cult (or a different religion altogether, depending on where you draw the line) that sprang up in southern Europe in the Middle Ages. It was dualist (they believed in both a good Creator and a bad/lesser one, and saw the material world as inherently evil while goodness resided only in Spirit). Adherents rejected the hierarchy and the Sacraments of the established Church, as well as the Old Testament - although they identified with the Gospels. Instead they embraced poverty, good works, celibacy, gender-equality, vegetarianism and reincarnation. By medieval standards they were just HERETICS, and a crusade against them was declared in 1209 by the Pope.

This was an episode that really cannot count as Christianity's finest hour, even given the particularly low bar set by the Catholic Church. Only about 10% of the population in the Languedoc region were Cathars, but they had a lot of support from local people including many local nobles, who attempted to protect them. One of the most notorious incidents was when the town of Béziers was besieged by Catholic forces. When they breached the walls the papal legate in charge ordered all the heretics put to death.
"How do we know which ones are heretics?" he was asked.
"Kill them all," he said; "God will sort them out," and 20,000 men, women and children were slaughtered.

The last Cathar parfait was burned alive in the courtyard of  Villerouge-Termines castle. They now have a groovy medieval restaurant there.
Total death toll ...  hard to guess, but possibly around half a million. Catharism was successfully exterminated.

Wednesday 9 April 2014

Sehnsucht

Sehnsucht by Oskar Zwintscher (1870-1916)

German has some awesome words that we just don't have an equivalent for in English. Like schadenfruede ("the pleasure you get from another's pain or misfortune") and gemütlichkeit ("the warm fuzzy feeling you get when you are cozy, a little drunk, and surrounded by friends,") and weltschmerz ("the misery you feel after too much surfing the Net or watching the news, when you become convinced that the whole world has gone irredeemably to ratshit").

Here's one I found out about recently, and I just love it. Because it describes a feeling I've known since childhood, and never had a way of expressing. In fact because its an unlabelled feeling in English, I didn't actually know anybody else ever experienced it. I thought it was just me.

It's sehnsucht:"a deep yearning for something unknown" or, perhaps, "an ecstatic sense of homesickness for a place never actually visited or known to exist." It's not an actual physical place or object that you pine for so intensely. In fact, it can be hard to know what it is you are craving - just that it is out of reach.

The "Blaue Blume" is used as a literary symbol of transcendent longing.
It's a joyous feeling despite the lack of fulfilment. Often it's expressed in terms of a need to "come home" - particularly where that is equated with death. Like this song:



Or this one:



In fact, Tolkien might be the sehnsucht author. His elves are consumed by a bone-deep aching to go West over the sea, to the Undying Lands where they belong.

Tolkien's friend CS Lewis wrote about sehnsucht very consciously. He thought it the strongest and most important drive in his psyche - and eventually equated it with the soul's yearning for God. He described it like this:
"That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves."
For me personally, the sensation (which was ferocious enough during adolescence that it has to have had a hormonal component) is most strongly associated with landscape. When I first visited the wet Atlantic seaboard woodlands of the Lake District I went into emotional meltdown. But I also remember a dell in my primary school playground - just some trees and daffodils and grass - that had the same resonance. Quality of light is also effective: a clear blue evening, especially when the pink cherry blossom has fallen on the spring grass, makes me dizzy. Autumn as a whole does it for me. Paths that lead into woodland do it - in fact there's one a mile from my house that gets me every bloody time.

It's not this path. But it's a bit like it. And that is sehnsucht in a nutshell...
Some poetry does it too - individual lines from T.S Eliot in particular, though god knows I'm not bright enough to find his actual poems anything but opaque.

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces,

What started me blogging this? Well, my WiP novella series The Wheel of the Year is inspired in part by my experience of reading Lewis, and I'm going to be exploring emotional themes like sehnsucht, I think. My heroine is going back to a place she knew and loved in childhood, so all the feelings associated with the place and with her growing self are welling up again. Only this time, she has an adult perspective ...
I'm interested to see where this'll go.
:-)

Monday 7 April 2014

Eyecandy Monday


In honour of my new lawn :-)
Not that I'm saying any bits of this woman are plastic, obviously...