Sunday 31 August 2014

Phenology - August

August brings the sheaves of corn*,
Then the harvest home is borne.

*wheat, to you 'Muricans.
Appropriately enough (though it doesn't say much about my speed), my phenology exercise this year has finally caught up on my writing, so I've actually been writing about August in Lover's Wheel during August. Which prompts me to -

ARGH! - WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?  IT'S NEARLY AUTUMN!

The horse chestnuts - usually first out in leaf, and first to shed - are just starting to turn
Yes, the lawn has stopped growing and foliage is no longer the priority for plants. They are thinking about SEED instead. By the end of August, sloes are ripening on the blackthorn bushes:

Prepare the gin!!
... Hawthorn berries on the may hedges:


.... Rosehips on the dog roses:

Blackberries on the bramble bushes:


And berries on the rowan tree:


And the elder:



It is a veritable fruit pie in the making! Just don't add cuckoo pint,... because it'll kill you (through asphyxiation, unusually - it makes the throat lining swell up horribly).

"Pint" means "penis," btw. Dirty botantists.

There are still plenty of flowers around though ... The verges in Scotland, I noticed, are bilious with ragwort:

Poisonous, particularly to horses

And bindweed tries to look lovely and tropical in order to distract you from the fact it's smothered every damn thing in your garden:


And in the uplands and heaths, this is the time of year the heather is in bloom:


August makes me hungry. Luckily, as all will agree, fruit you pick while walking contains no calories :-)

Friday 29 August 2014

Kiss me quick ... and shut me up

I love my library card!

Do you like the sound of your own voice when recorded? I don't, which is why I can't listen to Rose Caraway's podcast of our chat!
(But the rest of you are entirely welcome to, of course)

Rose and I had a lovely (giggly) time discussing the origins of Three Legs in the Evening, my contribution to The Sexy Librarian's Big Book of Erotica, along with other topics like "Have you ever killed anyone?" and "What's your favourite curse word?" so all I can do is hope that she edited out anything I said that was particularly stupid or reckless...

;-)

If you go over to the post you can, btw, see some of the pictorial inspiration behind my story.

BONUS: You can listen to the whole of my outrageously kinky petplay story Being His Bitch here - read by Rose! Now! Free!

Wednesday 27 August 2014

Away with the fairies

A rare photo of the native Haggis at large. They eat fragranced nappy-bags, did you know?
Last week, you may have noticed, I vanished off the grid and had NO INTERNET. That was because I was up way way north with da boyz, on the Isle of Skye:


It is a place of spectacular, mind-boggling beauty:

Dunscaith Castle

The Mealt Waterfall, and Kilt Rock beyond.
Near Sligachan - BEWARE THE MIDGES!!!

Sleat peninsula

Also a place of WEATHER - stand still for more than ten minutes and the weather will change totally -
- and FAIRIES.

We visited the Fairy Glen:


Me atop the fairy "Castle Ewan"


Fairy spirals (and sheep) in the glen

And saw the Fairy Flag at Dunvegan Castle:


We crossed the Fairy Bridge:

A MacLeod chief's fairy wife ditched him here and went home, leaving him with the flag.

And found the skeleton of a Kelpie or Water Horse:


I am not kidding you!

I mean, would I?

We had rainbows outside our cottage most days:

Might have had something to do with the quantities of Talisker we bought...
And we checked up and definitively answered the question about whether any of us were going to Heaven.

Er ... no.

Seriously, in a remote ruined churchyard in Trumpan there is an ancient Heaven Stone. You are supposed to close your eyes and attempt to stick your finger in the hole. If you can do it on first try, you're In with the angelic host.

OBVIOUS FAIL
Ah well. I wasn't optimistic, to be honest.
Who needs Heaven anyway? I'll stick with Scotland :-)

Monday 25 August 2014

Blue Monday

Every Monday I post a rude excerpt for your entertainment.


While I was away and wasn't looking, The Sexy Librarian's Big Book of Erotica (ed. Rose Caraway) snuck out into publication! So my excerpt for today is from my story in the anthology:  Three Legs in the Evening.

In ancient Greece, disgraced and blinded King Oedipus is confessing his life story to a mysterious woman:



 “I want to know,” she said, “about Phix.”

 He went very still. “How do you know her name?”

 “I’m the one who asked for a story. And I want to hear the things you don’t tell other people.”

 “Really.” His neck was taut and now his hand curled, almost to a clench. He was taller than her, and if he had been sighted she would have been within easy snatching distance. Respectable women never came this close to a strange man, not on their own. Certainly not when the man had such an obscene reputation. “The things I don’t tell other people?” he wondered. “That won’t be hard. They’re only interested in the end of the tale.”

“But everybody knows how it ended. I didn’t have to come find you, to hear that bit of the story.”
 
“Hhh. Well. If you like, then. You’re not frightened of a story from a man’s point of view?”

All stories are told from a man’s point of view,” she sighed.
 
“I meant...”

 “I know what you meant. Go ahead. I want to hear.”
 
He nodded, and moistened his dry lips. “Very well. Not the end, then. The beginning. You have to understand it from the beginning, or you’ll not believe.” He leaned back against the sarcophagus. “I was brought up as a prince of the palace of Corinth. Son, so far as I knew, of the king and queen there. Ignorant that I was a foundling, adopted—because everyone who remembered had been instructed to keep silent upon the subject. And there was a girl there—Is this the beginning? I’m not used to telling this part—There was a servant girl there in the palace…a Libyan…who had the most beautiful breasts.”
 
He paused, and tilted his head back, as if seeing the long-lost girl with his empty eyes.
 
“She was older than me, of course. I used to follow her around the palace when I was a youth, just to stare at those breasts. They were the color of pine honey, deep-clefted and firm and big, you understand, really big, swelling against her dress. And I wanted nothing in all the world so much as to lift those ample globes in my hands and suck upon her nipples and bury my head between them and suffocate there.” He smiled wistfully. “Don’t get me wrong—she was pretty too, with a big smile and a waist like so—” he shaped it, tiny beneath his masculine hands “—and a fine rump as round as the full moon, that waggled when she walked. I liked all of her, but oh…her breasts had me in thrall.
 
“You know, even if I weren’t blind, I don’t think I’d ever see a pair so perfect again.
 
“All the servants sniggered at me. ‘Here comes your puppy-dog again, Clio,’ they would tell her: ‘wagging his little tail as he follows you.’ And she laughed at me too, but gently. She liked me. The day she caught me by the hand and pulled me into a storeroom and said, ‘Time to do more than just stare at my tits, Prince Oedipus,’ as she pulled open her clothes and laid my hands upon her…I think that was the happiest moment of my life. I felt like a man must feel touching a goddess. I felt like I was holding the sun and the moon in my hands. I felt like all the mysteries and treasures of the earth hand been given to me.
 
“You know what the greatest wonder was? Her nipples stiffened as I touched them. They rose up, and their areolae puckered to the drag of my fingers, and she sighed and giggled. Her parts reacted to me—and I knew for the first time that a woman’s body felt pleasure just as my own did. Nobody had ever told me that. She loved me touching her.”
 
Oedipus shook his head in reminiscence. “Her tits. That’s what she called them. A low word for such glorious things. ‘Tits’ and ‘cunny’ and ‘ass’ and ‘clit’, those were the words she used, and she taught me all about them, over many months.
 
“And I was a diligent scholar, keen to master every lesson and put my learning to the test. I prided myself on the skills I developed under her tutelage. When, for the first time, Clio straddled me nose-to-tail and said, ‘Make me fall first, Prince Oedipus, and I’ll suck your cock until you spurt down my throat,’ I made her come three times before I let her finish me off.
 
“This is the secret I learned from her: a woman’s pleasure does not come, as almost every man thinks, from her being filled and stretched and pounded by the biggest cock possible, like a pestle banging away in a mortar. Oh, it’s far more subtle than that. And far more complex. A woman’s body is a labyrinth to be solved.
 
“I took the skills my Clio taught me, and practiced upon other women. Bee-keepers and dancing-girls and weavers and potters…My reputation spread through Corinth like spilt wine, and couldn’t be stopped. Through giggled confidences, they learned from one another. They came to my chamber by night and lured me into barns by day. They wanted to know if I was all I was rumored to be, and I delighted in confirming the tales. That was my pleasure—my obsession if you like, for it became like a yearning for wine or opium. I lusted to make women come. My own fist upon my cock was good enough for me, though I’d no objection to the hotter embrace of a mouth or cunny. But what I really wanted, what I could do for hour after hour, was to lap the nectar between a woman’s legs, and make her arch and swear and blaspheme. To take the shy and gentle maid and make of her a raving maenad. To have the lissome creature astride my face beg for more and more and more, and then weep with joy and thank me and kiss my cock like it was a god. I took delight in pushing a woman to so many climaxes that she would beg me for mercy out of sheer exhaustion.”   

“And were you merciful?”
 
Oedipus smiled. “Oh, eventually.”
 
She bit her lip and was glad he couldn’t see her flushed cheeks.

 “It became a point of pride for me that no woman was immune to pleasure, under my hands. I would rise to any challenge: young or old, fair or plain. An ambassador of the Amazons, corded with muscle and scar-tissue, who had never had any use for a man, laughed at my reputation—but she’d changed her mind by the next morning and confessed publicly, blushing, that I had proved her wrong.
 
“After that I trod closer to the edge of propriety. I took two priestesses of Artemis to my bed and sent them away the next morning reeling and wide-eyed and debauched—but still technically virgins despite the throb of their licked and well-fingered winks and the taste of my semen in their mouths. Married women threw themselves in my path—but who could make an accusation of adultery, when my cock never went near the forbidden shrine of their marriage? My preferred site of oblation was across the pillowy expanses of their tits.”
 
He smiled, fondly, then shook his head as if he were waking from a dream. “Eventually I provoked too many complaints from confused and outfaced men. To get me out of Corinth and give the pot a chance to stop boiling, the king sent me on a mission to the Oracle at Delphi. Some question about the siting of a new temple. So I went, with a dozen companions.”
 
His smile had gone now. His mouth was a hard line. “There, in the dark of the cave, the Pythia breathed in the fumes from that crack in the floor that leads to the Underworld, and then slipped from her high stool into the priests’ waiting arms, thrashing and gibbering. All very holy. It made my skin crawl, if I am honest. They carried her forward to where I waited, and she looked straight at me with pupils wildly dilated. And then she said it…You know that bit. Everyone knows that bit.”

 “You will kill your father and marry your mother."


Rose is running a series of interviews and podcasts with the contributing authors of this big and bouncy collection. I'm being interviewed later this week, so I'll let you have my link soon! In the meantime, The Sexy Librarian's Big Book of Erotica is available RIGHT NOW as a paperback or e-download:

Amazon US : Amazon UK

Friday 15 August 2014

All that jazz

Trombonist Clay Smith was rumored to have said, "If the truth were known about the origin of the word 'jazz,' it would never be mentioned in polite company."


As a huge fan of the 1920s - cocktails, flapper dresses, lurking tentacular monstrosities and all - I'm delighted  today to welcome Jill Boyd to my blog, to introduce us to her new anthology Flappers, Jazz and Valentino.

"Is it not enough to lead my son into wild ways without teaching my daughter the tango?" – Dona Luisa, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Step back in time to a decade full of glamour, glitz and decadent sin with this collection of erotica set in the Roaring Twenties. With twelve stories, in all shades from romantic and sensual to burning hot, this collection is the perfect appetizer for a night out at the speakeasy. A journalist gets a sexy introduction to the sinful syncopation of jazz music. A three-way tango performance becomes the steamiest ticket in town. The owners of a speakeasy set up a very special audition for their new trumpet boy. All this jazz and more in Flappers, Jazz and Valentino, edited by Jillian Boyd.



Lovely to be here on Janine’s blog!

I’m Jillian Boyd, and I’m a writer of erotica and erotic romance with a touch of my own brand awkwardness. I’ve been doing this erotica thing for three years now, and I’ve recently added another string to my bow: I’ve edited an anthology.


The anthology is entitled Flappers, Jazz and Valentino – Roaring Twenties Erotica and is a sexy and saucy ode to the Jazz Age. Eleven authors, twelve stories and one very proud (and tired) editor. So, how did this anthology come about? Why the Roaring Twenties? Let me tell you the story.
 Last year, just before my 23rd birthday, I started contemplating trying my hand at editing. I sent an email to my publisher, House of Erotica, and enquired (in a roundabout, “maybe kinda” way) if there was a pitching procedure, if they’d work with first-time editors, that sort of thing. Needless to say, I really wasn’t expecting a positive reply.
So when I actually got one (shock, horror), I set to work on my call for submissions – and deciding on my theme. The theme was the hardest thing to decide on (apart from which stories to put into the anthology, of course). I went through everything I could think of, settled on one thing, and nixed another one... and then I thought of the Twenties. It was an era I’d always been fascinated with – the first bonafide movie stars, the carefree (and loud) Charleston dancing, the flappers... god, always the flappers. Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, Zelda Fitzgerald... I love them all. Women of a dangerous generation (as it reads on the cover of Judith Mackrell’s book about them and other flappers). Women who, with the mere mention of their names, conjure up such vivid images of that dangerous and subversive age.

Et voila. I had my theme.


I went into editing mode in May, and somewhere in June, an anthology was sent off to House of Erotica. And that anthology is out on the 8th of August. Yay is the operative word here.
I’d love to present you with an excerpt from one of the stories featured. This one is from Life’s a Chocolate Cabaret, by V.C., a delicious and surprising tale which mixes two of my favourite things: chocolate and sex.
* * * * *

Chicago, Illinois. 1924.

The nightclub was more smoking hot than usual. The men were even hotter. Friends, acquaintances, strangers. Beautiful. Different and unique in their own way, but one and the same. The gangsters. I knew some of them in the crowd. Who was I kidding? I knew the majority of them. I didn’t dare say their names, not even in my head. I didn’t have time for an affair with a bullet. Their danger was always a turn-on, but I had a cabaret show to perform. My face was far too fabulous to lose. It was my money maker.

From the looks of it, it was going to bring plenty of bank for me that evening; it was a packed house. Those gangsters – they were suckers for me. Literally. My lips, my ass. My cock. They could suck on me all night long, if and when I allowed it. No matter if he was a gangster I knew or a gangster I didn’t know at all, their eyes were a mimicry. The lust in them, it was a lot of the same. I was more than able to handle their perverted desires mirrored in their lustful glances. They wanted me. And I wanted them. Their cock. Or cocks. In my mouth, and in my ass, if they were lucky.

Again for…who the hell was counting the fuckery? I didn’t only do it with the gangsters. There were the average Joes, the bankers, the brokers, the writers, and the down-and-out amateur film stars still in the search for their big break. They were all there too. They wanted me more. Young or old, I didn’t care. Who was counting how many of them I had? This speakeasy and nightclub was no ordinary one. It was the only one of its kind. It wasn’t for the flappers. It wasn’t for the average Josephines either. No women were allowed. Period. This night life was only for a very special kind of man. It was for men who liked more than liquor, jazz, and gourmet chocolate. They liked boys. A lot.
Cock was their candy. Ass was their aphrodisiac. A shimmy of the tassels on my chest, the wiggle of my bubble bottom, and a crotch grab from a pretty boi like me made them drunker than the excessive amount of liquor they’d consume. The smoke from their fat phallic cigars wasn’t the only veil that surrounded them. It was their hunger for me, and for the other cast members of the show, that always took the cake. We didn’t call our show Life’s A Chocolate Cabaret for nothing. Every man wanted to take a bite. They wanted us to melt in their mouth. They wanted to taste our flavour, as sweet as the decadence of honey and chocolate combined. But first, before they’d have their fill of all the candy they could eat, the show must go on.



Flappers, Jazz and Valentino is  published by House of Erotica

Here's the full line-up:

The Dance Partner – Lola White
Aboard the Aquitania – Brent Archer
The Sin in Syncopation – Blacksilk
Life’s A Chocolate Cabaret – V.C.
A Gal’s Gotta Make a Living Somehow… – T.G. Haynes
The Nympho – Angela R. Sargenti
Modern Motoring – Eva Starling
Songbird – Blair Erotica
Limelight and Gin – Sasha Distan
Tooting The Trumpet Boy’s Horn – V.C.
Genuine Chemistry – Annabeth Leong
The Argentine Tango – Tabitha Kitten

Amazon UK : Amazon US : Amazon Canada

Wednesday 13 August 2014

Nine Worlds pics

Shiny!

Yes, last weekend was the 2014 Nine Worlds Geekfest - at a rather posher hotel under the Heathrow flightpath than last year. And this time round there was OFFICIAL SMUT!

Yes, this year Kristina and Zak ran a workshop on Friday night: Geek Lust: how to write a sex scene. Due to tech problems (!) they ran out of time, but we had a rundown of the different erotica genres out there followed by a really interesting exercise where we took an excerpt from one erotic genre (steampunk say, or lesbian spanking), and then had to turn it into another genre (paranormal, M/M historical romance) by changing telling detail/attitudes/dialogue vocabulary. It was a reminder that erotica is much more than gymnastics with lube - World-building matters.


The workshop  was followed by a Smut Slam in which 10 of us read from our work - and no kidding, there was a really high standard of writing. I read a previously unheard and unseen excerpt from Cover Him with Darkness ... in which Azazel does something bad. Again.


Conventions of course have lots of games and discussion panels and filmshows and presentations. Some of my favourites were:
  • Choose your own documentary - an interactive real life exploration of the old CYOA gaming books ... and what happened when the documentary-maker found pages from a child's diary in a second hand fantasy book. Funny, nostalgic and moving - catch it at the Edinburgh Festival!
  • Jane Fae on Policing the Internet - a journalist's exploration of the (British) legal limits and pitfalls of putting edgy material online, and a call for a paradigm shift in the laws we make. The program highlight of the weekend for me! From my notes: Did you know that anything you write in e-space counts legally as "published" and therefore falls under the Obscene Publications Act? Yes, that includes private messages, e-mails and texts! Did you know that there are approx 2000 prosecutions p.a. under the Extreme Pornography Act - of which 90% are for depictions of acts with animals - which produce only about 70 convictions annually? Did you know there are a number of activities that are perfectly legal to DO in Britain - fisting for example- but if you take or own or download a photo they can put you in prison?
  • Emma Byrne on the Neuroscience of Swearing. (It has among other things, a genuine analgesic effect.)


I met friendly SF writer Ian Watson and had a feel of his tentacular staff, *ahem*.  I met up with Anna Sky and Charlie Forrest and we recorded a podcast together :-) I'll let you know when it's released!

I hung out with Jareth the Goblin King:


And Martial Law:

And suffered police brutality at the hands of Judge Dredd:




Cosplay is fantastic fun! Next year I really need to get my act together and go as as something other than "smutwriter". In fact I - like so many - am feeling the call of Steampunk...


Because who can resist the lure of tiny robots eating knitted cupcakes?


Sunday 10 August 2014

Comix


Because I'm at Nine Worlds, here are some superheroes to hold the fort :-)



There are of course many great comic strips out there ... But if you haven't seen Darkness by Boulet, do yourself a gigantic favour and pop on over to read it. Drawn and written in a single 24-hour stretch, it has everything an erotic romance fan could want ;-)

Friday 8 August 2014

Waterboys


Wooop! I had the sudden and very happy opportunity of seeing The Waterboys play live this week!


This is unexpected compensation for me not being at the Cropredy Festival this year to see them play there - because I'm at Nine Worlds Geekfest instead.
Have fun Croppers!

And it finally makes up for the time, years ago, when I went to see The Waterboys and the acoustics in the hall were so goddamn awful that the lead singer could not be heard over the drums.

I can die happy now ;-)