Shameless

"She was his beautiful, impossible creature: a woman, not reared to live in shame." -- from "Sealed" by Laila Blake, published in A Princess Bound: Naughty Fairy Tales for Women (ed. Kristina Wright).

This story is a complex exploration of the myth of the selkie, wound up with the concept of consent, with some breathplay and rope not only creating erotic tension but symbolizing the nature of the relationship between the main characters. Laila Blake is a masterful writer, and it's well worth reading.

I want to talk about the line I quoted, though. This line just breaks my heart and makes my gut twist. Blake's description feels true to me—a woman not reared to live in shame would seem like a beautiful, impossible creature indeed. I just don't want it to be true.

I've thought lately about how, despite so much effort to focus on female desire and female pleasure in much of the erotica that's being published, there are these moments when the curtain slips and one can see how low the societal standard for those things is. That we should take shame for granted—that the idea of being free of it should be an impossible dream... I feel like all of us ought to be up in arms about that.

Jean Roberta engages with this a great deal in her work. Her book The Flight of the Black Swan is an impressive envisioning of sex enjoyed without shame, and I'm sure it wasn't easy to write.

I notice in a lot of my reading the many signals that writers are sending that this particular thing is "nice" erotica, not "shameful" erotica. Especially in erotic romance, there are all these things—the heroine is acting out of character, overcome by the hotness of the hero. She'd never normally behave this way. It's been a long time since she had sex really. A lot of this amounts to, "She's not a slut." And she needs to not be a slut or else it seems like the sex becomes too illicit to be enjoyed. There's a flip side, of course—the eroticization of shame. That's a powerful tool, and maybe important for resistance.

More and more, though, I'm thinking about the question Roberta's asking in her work. What would this look like without shame?

And here's my question: Why are we taking "reared to live in shame" for granted?

Genuine Chemistry

I'm going to have a story in that lovely book right there. It's called "Genuine Chemistry," and it's about a gender-nonconforming moonshiner who's lying low in a small factory town until an elegant widow waltzes into her life.

I had a whole lot of fun researching it—so many fascinating transitions happened in the twenties. It made me realize that the 60s weren't the only time sexual freedom increased in the world. And there are plenty of nuances, such as the significance of Chanel No. 5 perfume (a scent that was intended to mingle the muskiness of the "scarlet woman" with the floral aroma of the "nice girl"). Check out these gorgeous perfume ads. I also found great resources about historically accurate underwear (thank you, Vintage Dressmaker!), and 1920s slang, and one academic paper I used for information on words used for lesbians in the 1920s.

What I did not find great information about was strap-on sex in the 1920s, so I used some imagination, combined with the knowledge that there are pictures from the 1800s of it occurring, so it was a thing people had done.

I'll post a snip from the story when the anthology is out!

Where I've Been

My posts have been a bit thin here recently, but I've been writing once every two weeks at Oh Get A Grip, a fantastic group blog that has a format I'm really excited about (10 authors write one post each on various prompts).

Our topic for the past two weeks has been "One Moment," and that's as open as it sounds.

I wrote today about first times, denial, sexuality, and the one who got away:

I wasn't a virgin in the technical sense. I'd been with a number of boys by then. But recently, I've been thinking that night was my real first time because it was the first time I wasn't performing a role. Until then, I was always acquiescing to various coercions, making deals, feeling charged with being either the sexual gatekeeper or the automatic dispenser of magical sex favors. With her, we were both doing what we truly wanted to do. We were both excited but awkward but sweet but scared. Sex had never felt so mutual to me before.

If you'd like to read the rest, it's here.

For the Love of a Soldier

I've got a ton of news I should post, but there's no time like the present to get started, eh? Yesterday, I got the word that I'm going to be in the excellent Kristina Wright's forthcoming military erotic romance anthology, For the Love of a Soldier. (And have a look at that cover!)

I really enjoy military erotic romance—it hits on hot themes like honor, duty, loyalty, and muscle—but having grown up the daughter of a Vietnam War veteran and having many friends who went on to serve, what I particularly appreciate are nuanced approaches. I love deep explorations of the difficult questions of war—and I'd be uncomfortable with simple fetishization of people in uniform. I know which one of those we're going to get from Kristina, however—her previous military anthology, Duty and Desire, blew me away in terms of both emotional depth and hotness (see how floored I was by Shanna Germain's story, "Shattered").

That's a preface for explaining why I particularly care about my story in For the Love of a Soldier, called "True North." I wrote it in honor of my father (on the anniversary of his death, in fact). Weird to say for erotica, perhaps, but true nonetheless. My father's identity as a veteran was so complicated for me. I saw that he'd been shattered by the war in Vietnam—injured, both physically and emotionally, he was never quite able to return to society. On the other hand, I saw his pride in what he'd accomplished as a soldier, and I saw that it was the military that cared for him toward the end of his life. He shopped at the PX, went to the VA hospital, and was buried in a National Cemetery because I couldn't afford anything else when he died. The main character of "True North" is slightly autobiographical in that she's dealing with the death of her father and similar mixed feelings, because I really wanted to write about that paradox. At my father's funeral, I was struck by the sincerity of the attending soldiers' ability to honor a man they didn't know—another thing I describe in "True North." The romance that ensues with one of those soldiers is the fictional part of the story, but I hope it conveys the deep respect I have for those struggling with the paradoxes of serving one's country and those facing down the difficulties of war with the strength of character required to do so.

Here's the table of contents for the anthology, which is slated to be out in November:

For the Love of a Solider: Military Erotic Romance
Table of Contents
Introduction: Love in Uniform
Penelope Pending by Axa Lee
Drifting Toward You by Kathleen Tudor
Duty by Cat Johnson
True North by Annabeth Leong
Home for Supper by Geonn Cannon
For the Love of George by Victoria Blisse
Blame it on the Dog by Andrea Dale
Special Love by Sidney Bristol
Stones by Tahira Iqbal
Lexie’s Arrow by Martha Davis
Jersey Boy by Tina Simmons
Failure to Launch by Lucy Felthouse
The Aid Station, 1916 by Victoria Janssen
Fair Game by Lynn Townsend
Lucky Charm by Lea Griffith
Long Time Coming by Kristina Wright

Preorder button should be up on Amazon by the end of the month!

Conqueror Womb

Any friend of mine could guess the moment I decided to write a story for Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath—the moment I heard of it. Now, this monstrous book is finished and ready for release on February 10. In the meantime, you can preorder it from Martian Migraine Press.

Here's what the publisher has to say:

Pulsing with some of the best writers working today in Lovecraftian horror (Wilum Pugmire, Molly Tanzer, Brian M. Sammons to name a few!) and mind-bending erotica (Shon Richards, Annabeth Leong, Jacqueline Sweet to name a few more!), plus a host of fresh talent! (Feel quite free to bow before the ToC, too, we won’t mind…)

Praise & Abundance! - introduction by editors Justine Geoffrey & Scott R Jones
This Human Form – Lyndsey Holder
That Hideous Thing – Ran Cartwright
Unsatisfied – Brian M. Sammons
Mater Annelida – Victoria Dalpe
The Potboiler Sigil – Luke R. J. Maynard
All This For the Greater Glory of the 7th and 329th Children of the Black Goat of the Woods – Molly Tanzer
Babymama – Kenton Hall
Our Child – Annabeth Leong
Boy – Don Webb
Pieces (2) for String Octet – Copper Sloane Levy
The Whisperer in the Vagina – Shon Richards
Obsidian Capre Aegagrus – Christopher Slatsky
Dirtymag – Jonas Moth
With Honey Dripping – Christine Morgan
In the Down Deep Down – Jacqueline Sweet
The Scarlet Scripture – Ambrosius Grimes
Within Your Unholy Pit of Shoggoths – Wilum H. Pugmire
Blossom – Rose Banks
The Conqueror Womb: Parsing Shub-Niggurath (essay) – Scott R Jones

I'm really proud of my story in this book. As is proper for weird erotica, I plumbed the depths of my personal nightmares for your disturbing pleasure. And, as a Valentine's Day release, this provides lovely balance for some of my sweeter work. Enjoy!

Sex and Romance in a Limited Time

Thirteen years ago, I spent two weeks in Hong Kong, and I've never forgotten the monasteries I visited while I was there. Whenever I've traveled, I've always most enjoyed religious sites, and this is partly because there's a wordless sense of communion in these places. Locals mingle with tourists and tourists from all parts of the world mingle with each other. Some people are there because the guidebooks told them to be, and others because they have sincere religious feeling, but I've never felt that these different purposes take away from the experience.

When I saw the call for Kristina Wright's XOXO: Sweet and Sexy Romance, which asked for very short pieces of erotic romance, I thought of travel right away. In so many fantasies, vacations unite these three elements—limited space and time, eroticism, and romance. As I began to ponder what sort of vacation would do the trick, vivid memories of Hong Kong came to mind.

I was 19 when I visited there, and I remember meeting a man who lived in the same state I did. We had a twenty minute conversation about how exciting it was to be "from the same place," and it struck me as funny. I knew I didn't feel general affection for every fellow resident of my fair state when I was at home. Traveling, however, changes definitions of same and different. The inherent time limit imposed by plane tickets also won't allow would-be lovers to dawdle or build up a slow burn.

I didn't take a new lover in Hong Kong—I had traveled there with my lover at the time, but I've hooked up while on vacation, and I recall the urgency and romance of it. I have always had the knowledge in the back of my mind that I can't afford to be foolish and lose sight of the fast-approaching end. When the vacation is over, I have never wanted to walk away with a broken heart. But my story in XOXO indulges the fantasy that this time it's different.

I didn't think the fantasy was enough on its own, though. I wanted to show why these two people were right for each other—why they needed to stay together beyond the vacation, when they would return to the everyday definition of common ground. I wanted the reader to believe it would be worth the five-hour drives required for them to hold onto what they found in Hong Kong.

First, I showed them traveling to a couple of the places I loved most.



The "Big Buddha" is near the Po Lin Monastery on Lantau island. (The picture here was taken by Mimihitam and posted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license). It's a very touristy site, and what I remember most was the long, terrifying bus ride required to get there. My characters meet on this bus, and this is where they first feel a connection—a sense of joy and freedom that might be the vacation, but just might be the result of being together.



Once they've established that connection, they decide to continue traveling together, and they visit the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery in Sha Tin. (The picture here was taken by CPJoseph and posted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license). This is the most incredible place I've ever been. As you can see from the picture, the statues go on forever, and as far as I could see each is different. Each has its own lesson and story. I remember climbing the stairs to the monastery already aching at the knowledge that I would forget much of what I was seeing.

As far as the story, I wanted the idea of unified difference to come through for the characters. And this is the location where they have their first kiss.

Soon, Amy, my heroine, knows she is falling for the hero, and begins to struggle with wanting more but knowing how naive it is to believe that this relationship can last beyond the trip. This is where I bring out the erotic aspect of the story. Together, these characters aren't just passionate, they're sweet and playful. Part of what I love about writing erotica is that I believe sex offers some of the best possible opportunities for characterization. It's my hope that seeing the way these two are in bed with each other helps the reader believe in them.

Often, writing involves taking fragments of my experience and remixing them in ways that seem surprising and mysterious when I consider what I've decided to throw together. "When the Vacation Is Over" is a good example of that process. Each part of the story, however, comes from something in my heart that's vivid and cherished. I'm so pleased to have been included in XOXO (this is my first time appearing in an anthology edited by Kristina Wright, and I'm stoked to be part of one of her excellent books).

***

This is part of the Won't You Be Our Valentine? blog tour for XOXO: Sweet and Sexy Romance.

The Universe Where Katie Lived

Like A Trip Through the Mirror: Lesbian Love in Alternate Realities, edited by Kathleen Tudor, was recently released by Circlet Press, and I'm happy to tell you that it includes my story, "The Universe Where Katie Lived."

In this story, Genevieve has discovered that reality "slips" whenever she has an orgasm. Over the years, she has learned various ways of regulating herself to avoid losing Katie, the woman she loves. For some time now, she's been insulated from her fears because a spinal injury in her current reality has made it impossible for her to come the way she always did. Genevieve's determined avoidance of orgasm, however, is causing tension between the lovers, and Katie presses for the chance to please Genevieve, unaware of the potential consequences. Here's a snip:

Katie answered with a kiss that deepened into a wild, full-on grope session. For the first time in years, Katie slid her hand down to Genevieve’s waist. Genevieve twitched. This was the transition point between where she had feeling and where she didn’t, and the gentle stroking of Katie’s fingers burned and scratched one moment, then faded to a ghostly breath the next. She sucked her breath in between her teeth and clamped her eyes shut.

“Sshh,” Katie soothed, kissing all over Genevieve’s face and down the side of her neck. “Let me touch you.”

Genevieve focused on relaxing her breathing, and slowly the raw, quivering sensations around her waist made her upper body writhe. An ache she hadn’t known existed began in the interior of her belly. Her hand moved toward her clit in a long-forgotten instinct.

“Good,” Katie said. “Can I lift you into your chair and take you to the shower?”

“Why?” Genevieve moaned, frantic and confused.

“I thought hot water would feel good. Besides, I want to clean you up real good to get you ready for all the dirty things I’m going to do to you.”

“OK,” Genevieve said again.

But once they reached the shower, Katie had more surprises. She pulled off her dress to reveal a lace bikini, through which Genevieve could see her erect nipples. She turned the water on and washed Genevieve with painstaking care and sensuality, covering every part so thoroughly that Genevieve was panting by the time it was through, just from thinking about Katie’s fingers gently working her over from forehead to asshole to feet and back.

Cleaning accomplished, Katie rubbed her body all over Genevieve’s, and imagination or not, Genevieve was sure she felt flashes of the rough stroking of Katie’s lace-covered breasts rubbing her thighs, and maybe even a few moments of the stabbing pleasure of Katie’s tongue across her clit.

“You’re wet,” Katie breathed, in a tone of wonder.

“I’d have come seven times by now if I could,” Genevieve said helplessly.

“People say they can still come, even if they don’t have sensation,” Katie said between licks, reaching her fingers up to tug at Genevieve’s lips and probe into her mouth. Genevieve opened for them and gasped when she tasted her own arousal slick and tangy on Katie’s hand. Katie continued, working her fingers in and out of Genevieve’s mouth. “People say it’s different, but it’s still an orgasm.”

A finger of doubt rippled up Genevieve’s confused spinal cord. She didn’t want to stop anything or fake anything. Would it be safe to let Katie continue? If she came only in her mind, would that count, as far as the universe was concerned?

I did a lot of research when I was writing this story, and hope I've done justice to the sexual experience of people with spinal injuries. There's not nearly enough information on this subject. Most of what I found was about fertility, not pleasure, and I found many accounts written by people frustrated that sexual pleasure was such a difficult topic to bring up with many health professionals.

I hope you enjoy the story. You can pick up the full collection here.