Various Updates

I've been collecting a bunch of things that I want to mention, so I'm going to gather them together into one news post.

Best Bondage Erotica 2014



It's out, and it's got my story "Eel" in it. I haven't gotten my contributor copies yet, but I'm looking forward to reading this, and am sure it's hot as always (and early reviews indicate it is). Editor Rachel Kramer Bussel has been collecting mini-interviews from the contributors, and you can find them here. I talked about the inspiration behind "Eel" here. And, because this came up on Twitter, we're not talking about eels as in the creatures here—the story is about a woman who likes to escape from ties, much to the consternation of her various tops.

The Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath



Do I have to tell you how much I love it when I get a chance to dirty up the Mythos? My story, "Our Child," is slated for inclusion in this forthcoming book from Martian Migraine Press, edited by Justine Geoffrey and S R Jones, and oh my elder gods I had fun writing it. It's got the distinction of being my first Lovecraftian milking fetish erotica (because Shub-Niggurath is a fertility goddess, you know). And that's not all it's got. If I do say so myself, it also has a serious literary point.

As a side note, I attended a conference last year on Lovecraft and all things Lovecraftian, and I have to say I was very disappointed by the negative attitude toward erotica that I picked up from the panels there. Even if Lovecraft himself would have blushed with horror to know what I like to do to the Mythos, I think it's always been ripe for the ministrations of people in my field. I found it a bit rich to see writers of weird, pulpy horror prepared to dismiss another genre as schlock. My dears, we writers of weird, pulpy things should stick together, all innuendo intended.

I was so annoyed by the negative bias that when I got home I threatened half-seriously to go ahead and write "Booty Calls of Cthulhu" just to show you what pulp can be. Unfortunately, something very close to that title already exists on Amazon, so I'll have to come up with a different clever revenge.

When The Conqueror Womb comes out (I believe around Valentine's Day), let us all go out and buy many copies of it. I like to celebrate my weird erotica.

The Fugitive's Sexy Brother



My kinky suspense novel, The Fugitive's Sexy Brother, came out in paperback at the end of December! You can get it at Amazon as well.

Here's the blurb:

Emily Boysen is sick of low-level bounty hunting jobs that don’t pay her rent, and sick to death of her ex-boyfriend taking credit for her work. Ready to claim her due, she takes on the quarry of a lifetime, the notorious Fernando Bonavita. But instead of the fugitive, she captures his sexy younger brother, Javier.

Javier Bonavita never wanted to know the truth about his older brother’s activities, instead protecting him out of loyalty. When he uses his hacking skills to pose as Fernando, he never expects to uncover crimes he can’t stomach. Beautiful Emily has no idea how glad he is to be in her custody—as long as he’s her prisoner, he doesn’t have to face his brother.

Passion flares between Emily and Javier, and soon he’s putting the handcuffs on her. Suspicion grows along with their feelings, though. A sinister plot centers around Fernando, and untangling it will test their loyalties to the limit.

Oh Get a Grip!

I have joined the amazing group blog, Oh Get a Grip! Read the list of who else writes this thing and you'll see why I was so flattered to be asked to write with them. My first post was about my most treasured erotic books, and I will be posting there every second Thursday. Check it out (and be sure to read what my fellow contributors have got to say—this is a very talented group of erotica writers).

New Year

Hey, did you notice that 2014 started? Many people posted their 2013 word counts, goals, and such. I'll be honest—I planned to do the same. But as the days have slipped by, it's occurred to me that I'm happy I didn't. One of the main things I'd like to do this year is slow my obsession with counting. I have effectively tortured myself that way for many years. I would like to free myself of the tyranny of deciding whether not I'm a good person based on whether or not I crossed an arbitrarily selected threshold of words produced. So, let's leave my count for 2013 a mystery, shall we? I worked hard and wrote tons, and I plan to do the same this year.

That's all for now, though I hope I will have much more news to share in the coming weeks and months!

Then A Miracle Occurs

There's a famous cartoon by Sidney Harris that shows scientists at a board pointing at a complex proof. Between all the math, someone has written, "Then a miracle occurs." Obviously, this is unsatisfying, and yet that comic is so popular because it's captured something very true.

I know a lot about the writing craft. I have a master's degree in writing, have spent my entire adult life making a living this way in one field or another, have done much study and practice on my own, and have attended more workshops than I can count. I've worked with excellent and talented editors, many of whom taught me more than all my formal training put together. I have published hundreds of thousands of words of fiction and nonfiction, and written many hundreds of thousands more.

And yet...

When it comes down to it, I still don't know what goes on when I write my stories. The day before something is due I often don't know how the hell I'm going to make it work and get to the end.

And then a miracle occurs.

(Note: It pleases me thematically to schedule this post for Christmas Eve, but I don't intend to say that miracle is Jesus or anything.)

New Review Policy: No Numbers

I'm posting a review tomorrow for a blog tour, and this seems like a good time to mention that I've decided to stop rating things by number of stars. There are two main reasons:

1. I am fickle.
I have noticed that star ratings are very inconsistent for me. If I read a fun book over the weekend and I was excited and happy, I'll rate it 5 stars. Then, I might really analyze a book, write an intricate review, and in that context decide it is worth 4 stars only (because I am mentally comparing it to War and Peace/the best books I've ever read, etc). The books I've rated 5 stars are frequently not better than the ones I've rated 4 stars. It's very dependent on my purpose in reading and my mood. Looking back at my reviews on Goodreads a few months ago, I realized this bothered me. Publications such as Rolling Stone offer starred ratings and have a consistent system for doing so (I hope). Writing reviews is something I want to do for fun, with recognition that I'm reading some things for fun and some things more seriously, and I don't think that's compatible with the sort of star system that's on Goodreads or Amazon.

2. I'm not comfortable with the way I'm constantly being invited to rate things online.
I love to think and talk about books, movies, music, etc, and that's never going to change. However, I want to do that as a reader and engaged person, not as a consumer. I am weary of receiving e-mail asking me what I thought of whatever thing I just bought (food, book, movie, whatever). I'm not in that rating mode all the time, and I don't think it would be good for my mental health if I were. I don't want to constantly assess whether I've received my money's worth, and I don't think that's the most valuable discussion I can have about a book. This doesn't mean I won't criticize or praise. It means that I'll do it as a person, not as a wallet. The more invitations I've received by e-mail to rate things, the more I've become aware that they threaten to dehumanize both me and whoever created whatever I'm interacting with. Society is full of encouragements to ever higher levels of consumerism, and I think it's good to resist that as much as possible.

And there's one minor reason:

1. As a writer, I've struggled to be receptive to what amounts to a letter grade.
I'm not in school anymore. While I think reviews can be interesting to read, every writer knows that they're also fraught with minefields of impending insecurity. It is much easier for me to read someone's written thoughts, even if they're harsh, than to see my work reduced to a score. I especially struggle when I see a score with no explanation. In general, I try to avoid reading reviews of my own work, but when I can't help but look, I always deal with it better if I don't pay attention to the score. It takes the interaction into that school realm where I feel as if I need to worry about my GPA or something (and the way Goodreads and Amazon compile and average star ratings contribute to that further). If I could change one thing about reviews as a writer, I would take off the stars and letter grades. Since I don't like it myself, I'm going to do unto others.

I'll leave you with a comic on the subject of rating systems. I've always really enjoyed this one:

Go Ahead and Make It Sexy

I've seen a lot of interviews with erotica writers who push back against the image of themselves writing while wearing leather corsets and fuck-me pumps. "I'm just a regular person," people like to say.

I'll confess that I do my share of regular-person writing—-at the library, say, where I get a little thrill out of typing naughty words while most people probably think I'm working on a paper for grad school. But sometimes, I go ahead and make it sexy. I've put on those fuck-me pumps at the kitchen table and typed while my pointed toe makes me feel like a sex kitten. I've stripped down to black satin underwear because it got me in the mood to write a hot scene. Sometimes, my dom puts on my collar and I sit down at my laptop to write while in the safe, warm bubble of his control.

It's nice to do that sometimes. I consider it a perk of the profession.

Don't get me wrong. I have line edits to do and commas to check just like anybody else. But for me writing erotica is an act of passion, and sometimes I like to get passionate about it.

I've had kinkier ideas for writing. I've thought about writing while wearing insertable sex toys, for example (though I worry my words would flow drunken onto the page). I suppose you could picture me writing while wearing sweatpants if you want to (it does happen sometimes). Other times, though, I put on a mini-dress with no panties and turn myself on so much that when my dom gets home from work, he can smell that I've gotten the juices flowing--creative and otherwise.

This is sex we're talking about, after all. It's got to be okay to make it sexy.

On 'Throwing Like a Girl'

Recently, I was playing a tabletop role-playing game, and my character wanted to throw something. I rolled for it, and the dice didn't go my way. "You throw like a girl!" said the gamemaster, not once but four or five times, seeming to need to repeat the phrase as he reached the conclusion that my character had failed.

I smiled, but my chest burned. For years, I would have let that one slide, or nodded to it with a sense of shame, but these days I've learned a lot more about feminism and how to be a nice person, and I was angry at myself for letting him get away with that one.

I grew up about as far from feminist as possible. In my family, it was totally cool for men to tell women to go get them a glass of water, not as a joke, but as a command. Pretty early on, I decided that the way to deal with this was to avoid being seen as a girl as much as possible. I was not naturally talented at the activities traditionally associated with guys, but I tried really hard. I was jealous of the girls I'd read about who were just so good that they became pitcher of the boys team, or some such. I wanted to be a tomboy, but there were so many ways that I never felt I could really cut it.

I never got anywhere close to good, but I persistently beat my head against that wall. I played baseball, soccer, volleyball, basketball, and touch football. I was the first girl to ever attempt to participate in a game at my school called "beaming," which was an anarchic form of dodgeball that involved getting control of a rubber ball and throwing it at a random person as hard as possible. I was picked last for teams, was made fun of by boys and girls, and sweated out my recesses working damned hard to acquire skills every (boy) around me seemed to have been born with.

This behavior lasted all through elementary school, middle school, and early high school, pretty much until I discovered sex, at which point I became occupied by doing something else with the boys. I tried to have sex like a boy, too, but that's a post for another time.

Looking back, I don't know why I didn't go off and do something a little easier for me. I think I did like things about what I was doing. It was nice to be outside, nice to run around rather than attempting awkward conversation with the girls, nice to use my body even if it didn't always seem to take to what I was trying to do. For a very bookish girl, I think it felt great to feel strong, whenever I could manage it. I'll also never forget how it was whenever I wrested some accomplishment out of sports, such as the first time I threw a football with a perfect spiral.

It used to bother me that I wasn't great at sports because I wanted to prove people wrong when they said girls couldn't play well. The truth, however, is that I often could not prove that. I wasn't in the top 10 or even the top 50, and I probably never could have been. I was, however, not the very worst player, and I was of course far better than people who never played at all. Once, in college, the music class I TA'd for had a pickup baseball game, and I discovered I was the best damn player on the field, mostly because I knew which hand to put the glove on and how to swing a bat (my college was pretty bookish, what can I say).

So this was a big issue for me for a lot of years. For so long, I fought and fought against "playing like a girl" or "throwing like a girl" or even being a girl, really. But when the gamemaster told me my character threw "like a girl," this time I wanted to take him outside and see how he handles a football. My character may not have known how to throw well, but this girl throws like a person who worked really hard at something that didn't come naturally. Other people throw with talent, or like a person who never went outside, or who knows what. These days, I like being a woman and being seen as one, so I don't need to be good at sports to deny my femininity. On the other hand, I take deep offense to being told I'm not good enough just because I'm a girl, as well as to having all that hard work treated as if there's no possibility that it could even have existed.

I wish I'd spoken up then, but it makes me feel a little better to speak up now.

Remembering My Father, and a Tribute Offer

My father died a year ago today, and I'm going to try to write about it a little.

I have a lot of trouble with self-disclosure. Things come out when I'm writing fiction, but it's very hard for me to say them straight out, so when he was dying I talked only to my very closest friends about it, and certainly didn't post anything to the blog. I did find that, when I sat down to write Not the Leader of the Pack, I couldn't help putting a dying father into the book, and having the major conflict be about the heroine's efforts to reconcile the things her father asked of her before he died.

As anyone who has lost a parent knows, it's a huge deal. Suddenly, you are without origin. I had all sorts of wild feelings, such as the urge to have a baby right that very moment in some sort of evolutionary attempt to replace what I had lost. I'm still about thirty seconds away from tears whenever I talk or think about my dad. The loss hits me at very weird moments, too. For example, I sobbed through almost all of Kickass 2 because lost fathers are actually a major theme of that movie. I don't think I will ever "get over" this, and it's been nice for me to just own that, to go ahead and cry and miss him and know that nothing can actually fix that he's gone. That's not to say I'm not going on with my life--I've done lots of writing in the past year, gotten married, traveled abroad, cooked food, folded laundry, and all the rest--but I'm not going to try to force this huge feeling into the background just because that would be a more comfortable position to take.

Anyway, I've been thinking about him a lot lately, remembering what it was like to watch him go through his last days. I didn't actually get to speak to him--he didn't actually make any final requests of me--because he had a heart attack that left him brain damaged until he actually died. For about a month last year, I watched that, and cleaned up his things, and did a bunch of other stuff that was hard but also incredibly important.

I decided to write this post because of a tribute I read that someone else had written. I realize that I'm not actually saying anything about my father's personality and life, and am talking about my feelings instead. That's partly because my dad liked his privacy, and I'm not sure he would be happy about me telling a bunch of people he didn't know about who he was. I really miss him, though, and it seems best to leave it at that.

I do want to make some sort of tribute to him, however. I'm going to make a donation to the hospice that helped him in his last days. If you'd like to join me in making a charitable donation in his honor, I'd appreciate that. Your donation doesn't need to be large--mine's not. Here are some suggestions that seem appropriate: The American Heart Association, your local not-for-profit hospice organization, or an organization that supports veterans.

As a thank you for joining in, I'll send you a copy of Not the Leader of the Pack, or another title of mine if you've already got that one. If you'd like to participate, e-mail annabeth dot leong at gmail dot com, tell me what you donated to (I don't need a receipt--this is the honor system), what e-book format you prefer, and, if you're requesting an alternate title, which one you're requesting. I'll keep this going through Sept 4.

Thanks for reading, and best wishes to all of you!

My True Confession

I've got a piece coming out in a collection of erotic confessions put together by Barbara Cardy, at Constable & Robinson. It's too early yet to have a link, but I was excited to find out I'll be included, and I also thought I should mention... it's a true confession.

Obviously, I make a lot of stuff up for my writing, sometimes based loosely on true events, but most often not. My stories won't tell you too much about my real sex life, other than a bit about the flavor of it, or a glimpse at the sorts of things that turn me on.

In some cases, I've tried things in the bedroom after writing about them. It was strange to reverse the process. The confession I wrote is from the early part of my relationship with my dom, Dimitriy, and it describes the first time he used nipple clamps on me.

In the confession, I focus mostly on the description of the act, but it was also the moment I really fell for him. The last several years have been a lot about coming into my own -- as a writer, as a sexual being, and more. The morning after Dimitriy used those nipple clamps, I started to get a wild, exciting vision of my life the way it could be -- the way it would be if I accepted what I really wanted and went after it. I hope reading about the experience inspires someone to try something crazy!