Author interview for Xcite

I have a short author interview on Xcite books website - was feeling rather shy when I did this....link below

http://xcitesexystories.com/category/author-interview/

Sex. Art. Insects?

A fascinating photo book by NATACHA MERRITT is out May 2012,  called SEXUAL SELECTION.

“Her eerily intimate depictions of fucking and sucking transcend smut. Even literate smut.” Rolling Stone (about Digital-Diaries, 2000)

“The juxtapositions are exceptional… Of course I like the real people having sex, and to put them next to these other biological forms is really original and leads one's imagination to places it hasn't been…”  Richard Prince (about Sexual Selection, 12/2011)

Sex. Art. Insects?

In 2000, Natacha Merritt released Digital-Diaries (Taschen), the first ever book to feature exclusively digital photography. What was the 21 year old San Francisco native photographing? Her sex life with her friends, masturbating with and without accessories, in bed, in the shower, in hotel rooms, from every imaginable angle and with the camera usually at arm’s length. Digital-Diaries allowed the reader a no-holds-barred insight into Merritt’s fantasies, desires, exploits and realities. Her controversial work was soon featured in diverse publications across the world from Rolling Stone to The Observer, from Playboy and Der Spiegel to Dazed and Confused. The book went on to become an L. A. Times and Amazon bestseller, moving over 300,000 copies.

Merritt’s new book Sexual Selection is in many ways even more captivating. She applied her distinctive vision to a subtle and complex art, creating astonishing and surprisingly lyrical images as she compares and contrasts the sexual intricacies of plants and insects with her own elaborate sexuality. She returned to higher education to study evolutionary biology, noting “The leap makes sense when you are passionate about sex. All roads lead to evolutionary biology, speciation and genetics.” It wasn’t long before she became transfixed with arachnid genitalia, peering down a microscope for hours on end in order to capture the perfect images of a spider’s erect penis, one of the photos featured in her new book Sexual Selection, published in May 2012 by cult Berlin arthouse Bongoût. 

Each image is unmistakably a work of art that transcends easy categorisation. Lush and eerily intimate photographs capture the fleeting moments of arousal and grant us a rare insight into our universal sexuality. With the questions she asks as a scientist, she answers as an artist with photography and writing; why are some sexual practices and organs so detailed, complex and downright bizarre when this gets in the way of basic survival? As Natacha explains, “Sexual selection is the sensual side of evolution. It explains the ornate, the creative and the beautiful, it can explain arousal. It’s what gets us laid.”

By exposing the often over-looked sensual and sexual behaviour of other species as well as our own, Sexual Selection is guaranteed to broaden the readers’ sense of beauty and arousal regardless of their vantage point.

Pre-order your copy here: http://shop.bongout.org/p-1450-pre-order-sexual-selection-natacha-merritt.aspx

www.natacha-merritt.com & www.bongout.org/natacha_merritt.html

Red Grow the Roses by Janine Ashbless

Having had a lifetime's fascination with all things vampire, I'm thrilled to host information on Janine Ashbless' new erotic paranormal novel, Red Grow the Roses.  There's an excerpt further down this post, and having read it, I feel as horny as hell....

“Maybe you’ll be lucky. Maybe he’s not human. He’ll take you in his arms and you’ll feel his strength – a strength that makes it impossible to fight him. But you’ve already lost the will to resist, that moment he looked into your eyes and showed you all his hunger and his promise. You knew then. You knew that this is what you are for – what we are all for – with our warm beating hearts and our aching sexual needs.

We are for them.”

There are six vampires in the city. Ageless, terrifyingly beautiful and always hungry – not just for blood but for the other pleasures the human body offers. Sadistic chanteuse Estelle; feckless Ben; Roisin, the mirror-ghost; Wakefield, haunted by his own damnation; Naylor, the most feral of them all.

And Reynauld is the Good Shepherd, the one who holds them all in check. But his grip on his own humanity is fading, and when Wakefield accidentally kills a woman and Naylor gets the blame, a power-struggle erupts between the city’s immortal undead.

Red Grow the Roses tells of bloodlust and sexual desire; for vampires the two are indistinguishable. These transgressive, startling stories draw the reader down the darkest and most seductive paths of pleasure – to where the monsters are waiting.

Janine Ashbless is a multi-published author of erotica and erotic romance. Her first collection of erotic fairy, fantasy and paranormal stories, Cruel Enchantment, was published in 2000 by Black Lace. Red Grow the Roses is her sixth novel. Her stories have been published by Spice, Black Lace, Nexus, Xcite, Racy Pages, Cleis, Ellora’s Cave and Samhain, among others. She was Jade Magazine’s Erotic Fiction Writer of the Year 2009. Janine loves goatee beards, ancient ruins, minotaurs, trees, mummies, having her cake and eating it, holidaying in countries with really bad public sewerage, and any movie or TV series featuring men in very few clothes beating hell out of each other. She lives in England.

Author site/blog link:

http://www.janineashbless.com
http://www.janineashbless.blogspot.com

Excerpt from Red Grow the Roses by Janine Ashbless

‘I don’t feed from humans,’ Wakefield hissed, trembling.

            ‘That’s what I heard. I just find it hard to believe.’ Rolling onto her knees, she reached for the discarded rose he’d cut for her. ‘Nasty sharp thorns these things have got,’ she mused, laying the stem across her bare breasts. With a twitch she drew it down, scoring her flesh with half-a-dozen needle-pointed thorns, shuddering as the pain burned through her. Pin-points of blood rose on her pale skin and swelled, a string of rubies decorating the white flesh and the roseate nipples. ‘Ah,’ she groaned.

            Robert Wakefield seemed to grow taller; his hard-on bulged. She could taste the coppery tang of her victory.  

            ‘Tell me; have you ever whipped a girl with your roses, Mr Wakefield?’ Lilla began to crawl backwards from him on hands and knees, arse swaying, breasts wobbling. ‘Maybe one of your servants? The parlour maid perhaps? You ever taken a bunch of roses and whipped their tits?’ She put on a country accent for her next words, her voice suddenly breathlessly innocent but at the same time teasing: ‘Oh Mr Wakefield, you wouldn’t be thinking of doing that to a poor innocent girl? I couldn’t bear that sir – it’ll hurt something cruel. You wouldn’t want to ruin a helpless maid, would you, sir? You wouldn’t want that on your conscience?’

            Inhumanly swift, he lunged and grabbed the front of her bodice and yanked her up to slam her against one of the wrought-iron pillars. Eagerly Lilla extended her hands over her head, thrusting her breasts out so that he might feed. But he didn’t, not right away. He looked down at her with a face hollow with hunger, and then he took hold of her long drawers at the waist and snapped the drawstring with one tug of his wrists. He tore the damp, clinging cotton from her thighs to bare her sex, and then he tied her wrists with the twisted strips and secured her to a ornamental bracket high on the pillar, hauling her up onto her toes. She said nothing, words robbed from her by anticipation, lips parted about her shallow breaths.

            His face mask-like, his eyes burning, he plunged his cold fingers between her thighs and up inside her, breaching the gates of her sex to take the measure of her heat, the slick of juices, the yielding sucking flex of her tight hole. Lilla writhed on his hand, twisting helplessly with each thrust of his wrist, and he watched her breasts jiggle and bounce, their pink points dewed in red. His teeth were so extended now that his upper lip did not hide them.

            ‘Oh please,’ she gasped. ‘Please – bite me!’

Buy Links:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B006PW46O8/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=lucyfelthouse-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=B006PW46O8

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006PW46O8/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=lucyfelt-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B006PW46O8

http://www.mischiefbooks.com/books/red-grow-roses/

http://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-redgrowtheroses-679540-144.html

GUEST BLOG: Lucy Felthouse

I am totally delighted to host a guest blog from the wonderful and generous Lucy Felthouse, who is always so supportive of other writers.  Lucy is a graduate of the University of Derby, where she studied Creative Writing. During her first year, she was dared to write an erotic story - so she did. It went down a storm and she's never looked back. Lucy has had stories published by Cleis Press, Constable and Robinson, House of Erotica, Noble Romance, Ravenous Romance, Resplendence Publishing, Summerhouse Publishing, Sweetmeats Press and Xcite Books. She is also the editor of Uniform Behaviour and Seducing the Myth. Find out more at http://www.lucyfelthouse.co.uk. Join her on Facebook and Twitter, and subscribe to her newsletter at: http://eepurl.com/gMQb9

Real Life and Erotic Romance by Lucy Felthouse

For this blog post, I was asked if I would write something about a story that was inspired by actual events or personal experience, and how this affected the process of the writing. I looked at my backlist of titles, and decided this was definitely doable – so here goes:

My erotic romance short story, Loose Ends, is based on actual events. It's about two people that met at University. There was always an attraction between them, but they never acted on it because they were both with other people throughout the time they were at Uni together, and were never single at the same time. Then when they graduated and went their separate ways, they got on with their lives and so their attraction was completely unrequited.

That is the part that's true – and it certainly made for three very interesting years!

That is where the similarity ends, however. Without giving too much away, in the story, there's a University reunion which the lead female character, Lauren, doesn't really want to go to. After being coerced into it by her friends, she goes and ends up bumping into Jonathan – 'the one that got away.' She's shocked, as she wasn't expecting him to be there as he works and lives abroad. However, her friends get involved again and make her go and talk to him, and the two of them discover a) that the old attraction is still there and b) that they're actually both single, so acting on their attraction is perfectly okay.

I really don't want to say any more because it'll give away the entire plot. But basically, within the story, the part after graduation and going their separate ways is completely fabricated. I've never been to a University reunion – I don't think there's even been one!

So, to answer the second part of the question about how the factual element affected my writing, I guess it did in lots of ways.

For starters, the characters didn't have to be 'made up' in my head – they were already fully-formed, and available for me to put down on the page. So descriptions, personalities, vocabulary etc was a doddle. All the background to the story, though not word for word how things actually happened was easy to write, and as for the parts I completely made up, they were basically a fun way for me to explore the 'what if?' of the whole situation. Also – it meant I got to have some totally tension-filled, hot reunion sex without leaving the comfort of my office chair!

So, although most of my writing is complete fabrication, I have written some stories that have had elements of truth thrown in, and this is probably the 'factual' story I've penned. I think most of us have 'the one that got away' so if you like to read these kinds of reunion erotic romance tales, I think you may enjoy Loose Ends – a yummy nostalgic tale even if I do say so myself! ;)

When Jonathan and Lauren met at University, it should have been the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Sadly, it wasn’t to be, and Jonathan became ‘the one that got away.’ Years later, at a University reunion, Jonathan shows up unexpectedly throwing Lauren into turmoil. The pair start talking, and soon all the old feelings come back. But will this time be different, or will their mutual affection continue to be unrequited?

More info, excerpt and buy links: http://lucyfelthouse.co.uk/published-works/loose-ends/

Beside the seaside

I'm doing a reading in a burlesque show on Friday 16 March which should be fun!  It's in Cliftonville, beside the seaside......go to Facebook page for more info  http://www.facebook.com/events/314617745267215/

Nice Work

Hot off the press (well, the digital press...)   My recent short story Nice Work appears in Eve's Big Bang, a hot new e-anthology from Xcite.  I really enjoyed writing this one, and, unusually for me, it features a dom woman and a sub male.  I would love to hear your feedback.


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eves-Big-Bang-ebook/dp/B007CL47AO/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1330787100&sr=1-1