Sex Out Loud podcast, erotica writing interview & my career essay at Lady Smut

Here are some links to what I've been up to as I get ready to head off to a week of vacation in New England.

On Friday night, I appeared on Tristan Taormino's podcast Sex Out Loud, where she interviewed me about editing the Best Women's Erotica of the Year series, including why I want 500 submissions to Volume 3 (here's the call for submissions). Even more exciting for me was that we got to hear contributors Rose Caraway, Amy Butcher, Tara Betts and Lazuli Jones read from their sexy stories as well! Click the link above or the image below to listen (and please know it's not safe for work!).



The wonderful erotica author Emmanuelle de Maupassant interviewed me all about my erotica writing and editing career. Here's a snippet of what I said:

I’m interested in exploring aspects of sexuality and attraction largely ignored by pop culture: specifically bisexuality, polyamory, promiscuity, men and women with larger bodies and body image, male submissives, fetishes, or affairs. I don’t sit down to intentionally humanize and eroticize fat people (and those who love and are attracted to fat people) or male submissives and so on; it’s a by-product of the types of characters I tend to write.

Lastly, over at Lady Smut, I wrote about how that career evolved from my law school days as part of second chance week, inspired by the brand new (out today!) very hot erotic romance Perfect by Elizabeth SaFleur, which you can learn more about on her site.

Why I love publishing spanking erotica stories like "Restitution" by Ria Restrepo

I'm planning to detail on this blog why I picked each and every one of the 22 stories in Best Women's Erotica of the Year, Volume 1, for the benefit of those who've read them and want to know my reasoning, for the intrigue of those who are considering reading it, and for intel for those considering submitting to Volume 2 (the deadline is April 1st!).



Over at Lady Smut, I wrote "How to have an orgasm from being spanked", which is about what happens in Ria Restrepo's story "Restitution," in which pop star Ella Lopez is spanked by a police offer while being watched through a two-way mirror after she's caught shoplifting. It's a very sexy story on several levels, and I interviewed Ria about the psychology of spanking, her thoughts on her tagline "strong women who desire stronger men," BDSM and submission and more. I hope you'll check it out! You can also get more insight into her writing process in our Tumblr Q&A about "Restitution."

And of course, you can read "Restitution" in full in Best Women's Erotica of the Year, Volume 1. I don't only want to publish spanking stories (unless I'm editing an entire book of them), but I do want stories that push buttons—characters’ and readers’. I want stories that surprise me, that take a topic that may have been done thousands of times in different ways, like spanking, and still manage to say something new and unique and hot.

Get the book now at:

Amazon (print)

Kindle

Barnes & Noble (print)

Nook

Powells

Books-a-Million

IndieBound (find your nearest local bookstore)

Cleis Press

Amazon UK (print)

Amazon UK Kindle

Amazon Canada (print)

Amazon Canada Kindle

Why I picked it: "Jailbait Torch Song" by Valerie Alexander in Hungry for More

Welcome back to Why I Picked It Wednesday, a peek into my editorial decisions when selecting stories for my erotica anthologies, and a chance to highlight some favorites I've published over the years. Here I want to talk about "Jailbait Torch Song" by Valerie Alexander in Hungry for More: Romantic Fantasies for Women, whose title already pushes the envelope.



Jailbait. It's a taunting, teasing word. Are we supposed to be repulsed? Intrigued? Repulsed because we are intrigued? Yet it's the combination of the entire title that truly gives the story its meaning. As a reader, I often find it challenging to go toward the taboo, to not stop myself from enjoying it, to not think, In real life, would I be squicked or condemn these people? Powerful writing humanizes those society would deem sick or wrong, and in this case, even grapples with some of the ostracism the characters face for acting on their desires.

Dictionary.com defines torch song as "a popular song concerned with unhappiness or failure in love," with its origins coming from "the phrase to carry a torch for (someone)." That, far more than the taboo nature of a 29-year-old single mother having a torrid romance with an 18-year-old young man, is what this story is about, to my mind. Publishers Weekly called the story "unexpectedly poignant" and that captures part of what I loved about it, why I knew I wanted it in my book even though I also knew it would likely throw at least a few readers off with the way it employed its tenderness, its desire, its romance through an often socially unacceptable lens. What Alexander does is build both the tension and the taboo, weaving them, playing Tanner's teenage lust against Lyla's mix of propriety and hunger. The story starts off telling us exactly what she's strived to do for the last decade: "Lyla tried to be a good single mother." That principle guides her, yes, but she is also a woman, and has natural human desires, and the story forces the reader, and the characters, to question whether what we've been told about age differences is in fact correct. It doesn't give us an answer, but lets us decide, and pulls on our heartstrings in the process. Here's an excerpt of one of their earliest moments:

From "Jailbait Torch Song" by Valerie Alexander

He leaned into the car. “I just wanted to tell you that we have a home game tomorrow night. You should come.”

“Yeah, I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t have a reason to be there,” she said. “Because it would look weird.”

He walked away. Puzzled, she waited for him to return and say good-bye. Then the passenger door swung open and he climbed in the car.

Oh no. Quickly she elevated her window. “I have to pick up my son,” she said.

Then his hand was in her hair, hauling her across the seat and onto his long body as if she were weightless. He was shaking. His arms went around her, pulling her against his chest so hard she could feel his heart thumping. He kissed her with almost feverish desperation, his cold hands sliding up under her sweater and under her bra. “Don’t stop me,” he muttered into her mouth and then she was grinding all over the promise of his hard cock, humping him with abandon.

I don't want to give away the whole story, because it's a beautiful, tender, sexy, romantic one. It's one of the most memorable stories I've published, in my opinion, and one I could reread any time and find new nuances. I hope you'll check it out, and I hope I get to publish many more like this.

Buy Hungry for More from:

Amazon

Bn.com

Kindle ebook

Nook ebook 

Powells

Books-a-Million

iBooks

IndieBound (find your local independent bookstore)

Amazon UK

Amazon Canada

Amazon Germany

Cleis Press

Audible audiobook (click through to listen to a free sample)

Here's the other stories in the book:

Introduction: Getting Explicit

Submissive Jacqueline Applebee
Happy Endings Giselle Renarde
Craig’s List Greta Christina
Bringing the Heat Tiffany Reisz
Madam Secretary Jaye Markham
Kitchen Slut Olivia Archer
Just Once Jocelyn Dex
Boat Rocking D. L. King
The Sleeper’s Beauty Jade A. Waters
Upstairs at the Ava DelovelyOlive
Organically Grown Brandy Fox
The Room of Guarantees Jessica Lennox
Redrawing the Lines Bren Emile
Tickle Day Jeremy Edwards
Relief Katya Harris
Jailbait Torch Song Valerie Alexander
Red Lipstick Erzabet Bishop
Something Sleazy Elizabeth Coldwell
The Instructor Rose de Fer
My Pillar-Box Red Cock Tilly Hunter
A First Time for Everything Rachel Kramer Bussel

Want knitting bondage erotica? Best Bondage Erotica 2015 has it!

Over on the book's Tumblr, I've been posting excerpts from Best Bondage Erotica 2015 in the order they appear in the book, and today I got to a personal favorite, knitting bondage erotica story "Trinity's New Hobby" by Lucy Felthouse. This is my fifth year editing the Best Bondage Erotica series, so as you can imagine, I've read hundreds of bondage stories, and while I love the topic, sometimes even when you do what you love, it can feel monotonous. Then I'll get a story like this one and it will blow me away with its fun tone, creativity and use of a new implement I had never considered before. That, in addition to publishing authors new to the genre, is my editorial pride and joy.

I hope you'll check out the excerpts and the book!



To read “Trinity's New Hobby” plus all the other stories in Best Bondage Erotica 2015, buy it from::

Amazon

Kindle ebook

Amazon UK

Kindle UK

Bn.com

Nook ebook

Kobo

Books-a-Million

Powell’s

IndieBound (find your local independent bookstore)

iTunes

Cleis Press

How editing anthologies makes me a better erotica writer

I’m deep in anthology editing mode. It’s the first thing I do when I wake up, as I drink my coffee. It helps settle me into my day, eases me into the workflow. For some reason, which I haven’t yet deduced, this latest round of anthologies I’ve been editing much more heavily than I previously have. I don’t know if I’m seeing things I should have seen before, if I’m selecting stories that I believe need more work (for this is all completely subjective, save for misspelled words and such) or that I am just more ruthless.

I do know that by seeing aspects of stories I think can be improved, whether with a word added or deleted, a rephrasing, a clincher of an ending, it’s making me see my own writing in a new way. It’s showing me where the extra words are in my stories, for there are always some. It’s forcing me to truly synthesize what I think makes a good erotic story. I have always pretty much flown by the seat of my pants, and sometimes given up when the story got hard. But I’ve also learned what I like—the unique twist on a topic, even one I’ve covered umpteen times, the way my brain starts to envision the story, and what makes it erotic or perverse or romantic.

I rarely switch points of view, but I did it in my story “A Slap in the Face” (in Sinclair Sexsmith's anthology Say Please: Lesbian BDSM Erotica), which exemplifies something I feel strongly about in BDSM erotica, which I’m putting into play as I edit—that when you are dealing with topics many people might misconstrue, which in our culture covers everything from anal sex to BDSM to roleplaying, you need to make it very clear why it gets people off. You can’t just say “he hit me and it felt like a kiss”—even if it did. It may very well have felt like a kiss, or a painful but beautiful, life-changing erotic moment, for a character, but I want as broad a readership as possible, and I want people who have no idea what the fuck is erotic about, say, face slapping, to walk away from that story feeling moved by it, understanding what both those characters got out of the exchange.

Sometimes I hope to do with the new stories I’m writing is revisit some older stories and expand on what happens to the characters, even though my great thrill, my writing high, comes from creating new plots, new people to explore. This editing thing can be harrowing when you are trying to find 69 stories that fit a specific theme; just because they are 1,200 words or less doesn’t make it easier. It’s still 3 times the work of a typical anthology. Part of me is eager to do it again and part of me is telling myself “never again.”

But I’m grateful for this intense bout of editing because it’s sharpened my focus as I work on my own solo short story collection. It’s guided me to be more precise, shown me that I, in all my imperfect subjectivity, get to be the queen of my own books, get to have a viewpoint. It’s not that I don’t want authors to fully explore their own voices—I do, and when I did the Google+ Hangout last weekend, it gave me a renewed devotion to editing anthologies because it provides a publishing opportunity for writers that they might not have had otherwise, at least, not this specific one. I forget that sometimes, when the work feels too overwhelming and I just want to get to my 69 stories or 65,000 words and file it and move on. But I love the communal nature of an anthology, I love that the whole is always greater than the individual sum of its parts, I love that it can take a topic that seems straightforward and twist and turn it inside out, exploring so many ways of approaching it. I look forward to an editing break, but I also look forward to posting new calls, and learning about the process of editing an anthology with monkey mind, as if it’s my first, not my, I think, sixty-first.

More editing pet peeves

More pet peeves, and as I said, could be moot cause my editing days may be over, but still, these things are SO ANNOYING they make me wish I could get my act together and start writing books myself, finally, as I'm meant to be doing, rather than editing and dealing with minutiae. So in addition to all the formatting stuff:

1. Don't ask me if you're story's been accepted until after the time I've given you. I'll let you know (again, the books that aren't turned in yet I have been behind on, but the e-books, I promise to let you know).

2. Don't ask me why I rejected your story. It's not my job nor do I have time to give critiques.

3. Don't resubmit an updated version your story. Every damn time, whether I put it in the guidelines or not, people do this. Think a minute: once I have gone in and made my own changes and edited your story, when you resend it, if I start using your version, then I have to go back and re-edit. If it's something extremely urgent, the only way this would be acceptable is with the edits highlighted in red using track changes.

4. I'm actually rejecting something because the formatting was so bad it would take me ages to reformat - margins are a mess, spacing too. I prefer Word documents, or RTFs. That shouldn't be that hard.

I'm sure I sound bitchy, and again, maybe I'm not meant to be in this business. I'm trying to figure that out. But these things beyond get on my nerves. They do make me ever so grateful for the very professional authors who are always courteous, professional, and well-formatted.