Thanksgiving sex I'm thankful for

This week's sex column is all about sex and gratitude and Thanksgiving. With a smidge of politics:

Firstly, I'm grateful to live in a country where homosexuality and abortion are legally protected — for now — and to have received decent, though not perfect, sex education.

Now, for the personal blessings. Unlike the Duggar family of reality TV show 19 Kids and Counting, I don't believe saving sex for marriage is the key to happiness. Instead, I'm convinced all my previous hookups, dates and relationships have shaped me into who I am today. They weren't all positive, but they did each teach me valuable lessons.

I'm truly grateful that while attending CatalystCon I got one of those magic career-boosting emails asking me to write this column, which in turn has brought me to Philadelphia a few times and given me the chance to explore a city that's so near and yet so far (about an hour and fifteen minutes by car, or, for this non-driver, four hours by public transportation).

So much of my sex writing career has happened that way, though in 2015, I plan to set goals and push myself to pursue new opportunities, including writing, editing and teaching, but this year, many of them came to me. I've learned that you never know how long a column will last, so as I cook up new hot topics (and welcome your suggestions at rachelkb at gmail.com with "City Paper" in the subject line), I'm grateful for it in the here and now, however long it lasts. Writing a weekly column requires a lot of planning as well as being able to respond to the news as it happens, and that's something I look forward to doing into the new year.

Free audio erotica and major gratitude to the most excellent Rose Caraway

I'm feeling very lucky these days. Why? Because Rose Caraway is not only a narrator extraordinaire, but I have much to learn from her about how to self promote in a way that gets results! She has been posting away free audio excerpts from the Audible audiobook version of Gotta Have It: 69 Stories of Sudden Sex - follow her @RoseCaraway on Twitter to keep up. And check out these great images she made! I love that. I also love that you can listen to "Laugh" by Sommer Marsden free. There may not be a free lunch but there is free audio erotica! Thank you, thank you, thank you, Rose, and thank you, Audible, for widening the audience for my books. It still feels pretty amazing to get checks in the mail from them through their Author Services program (it's free money and if your books are on Audible, you should sign up) for doing absolutely nothing, but then I remember that my job is to write and edit erotica, and that is what I'm focused on (speaking of which, there's been extremely few submissions for my 2 open anthologies, which means these books are wide open as of now!). Anyway, I feel blessed and lucky and grateful, and am working on deserving that by getting back to writing, fiction and nonfiction, in a way I haven't in longer than I can remember. If I succeed, I'll post about anything available to be read. If I fail, I will keep on trying. That's the way this wacky business goes, right?






my books are in great company!