If you ask me, five weeks away from blogging is absence enough. Right after I posted the book trailer for Training Desire, I traveled by car to central Illinois to visit my dad who relocated there this past winter. He neighbors with my late mother’s younger brother and sister and my down-the-street cousins, so to say this was a family reunion is a bit of an understatement.
I haven’t visited central Illinois since I was a young adult, and it’s like rediscovering a part of the country I never developed a decent appreciation for in the first place. I enjoyed reconnecting with my dad and visiting with relatives. The weather was perfect, although the region had just come off a long bout of heavy rain. Farmers were still waiting for their fields to dry out and everyday the past without planting was a day of increased worry. By week’s end, we did see tractors out working so the situation had improved greatly.
We did a lot of Lincoln outings, visiting his house in Springfield and, to my surprise, learned that his father and stepmother had ultimately settled not far from where my mother grew up. I think we’ve now officially visited more than half of the official National Parks places associated with President Lincoln.
Returning from Illinois, I had only the slightest of breaks before I was off to attend Book Expo America. As American publishing’s premier trade show, it’s really something to behold. You might want to visit my other blog, Pursed Lips, to see what I came away with there.
Returning from BEA, I spent two weeks writing a new book proposal, a task that consumed me until I completed it. And wouldn’t you know it, but no sooner did I finish it then my son moved into his first official apartment. (Can you say “help me move, mom”?) It’s a big step for him, having lived for several years in independent living programs as a disabled young man. The lease is in his name along with his electric and soon to be established Internet accounts.
So that’s what’s kept me away, but now all’s said and done. I’m back and ready to blog.
Enough with the absent landlord. I have returned to tell you that I put together a book trailer for my newest novel, Training Desire! Thanks to better software, it has special effects and a voice over! And thanks to that same better software, I’m still in the grips of its learning curve so you audio/visual tech types will easily spot that I need to learn more about, well, audio/visual fine tuning.
I’m also pleased to share word with you that erotic author Louisa Burton, known for her Hidden Grotto books, kindly hailed my book for evoking
“a world of sacred sensuality and dark intrigue that’s sure to appeal to those with a taste for erotic fantasy.”
Louisa’s books are wonderful reads and I’m grateful to earn her nod.
Today’s NY Times explored how the romance novel is doing bang-up business in these lean times, thanks to savvy pricing and the ever-dedicated fan. That’s probably not news to the dedicated fan. She already knows how voracious a reader she is. But article’s main points were part of a learning curve I encountered when I considered making the switch from outright erotica to erotic romance.
First, I was absolutely surprised to discover wild-with-enthusiasm fans. I mean, I knew women read romance novels, but as a reader, I was very picky with the genre and therefore very isolated. Plus, I never ran into other readers in the romance section of my local bookstore, something that never happened in the SF/F section. But I quickly came to appreciate romance’s fandom and was completely smittered with their bright enthusiasm. You see, my personal fan involvement was, before this, limited to SF/F and a wee bit of /H where geekdom ruled. Ladies, you’re quite a different bunch from the fandom of my prior knowledge!
When I looked to promote my novels with Ravenous Romance, I quickly discovered that romance fans had captured Yahoo groups as their preferred on-line communication and socializing vehicle and remain loyal to it, despite the newer, bigger, better tools of the so-called Web 2.0. Because they use an older method, I knew they had banded together years and have been together ever since. I’m still blinking my eyes in amazement at the volume of traffic any one Yahoo romance group generates!
Last, I because exceptionally sensitive to the romance reader’s demand for affordability. You see, I come from a family of book collectors and readers. Spending good money on books was never frowned upon or discouraged. Upon my mother’s death years ago, everyone agreed I should have her library of poetry and fiction — which takes up three tall bookcases. I have my parents’ joint Shaker library, several dozen books that command a wide three-shelf bookcase. Our SF/F/H collection? Four tall IKEA bookcase. The erotic and erotic romance collection? Two ROOMS.
So money has never been a huge object. Sensible shopping, however? A must. But that’s another story for another day.
Most romance readers, I’ve found, are far more frugal than me. But they’re every bit as voracious in their consumption. To stretch a dollar and feed their habit, they buy and sell and trader among themselves. (You should see the second-hand market on ebay!) They eschew the trade paperback. They buy electronic books. The only other reading circle I’ve seen who come close to this kind of savvy sharing are senior citizens, either at local town centers or bridge groups. And they don’t binge read the way romance fans do!
So, yes, this is an appreciation. Especially because this old dog learned a new trick from y’all. Thank you.
I’m pleased to announce that Ravenous Romance has released my newest novel, Training Desires. It’s a fantasy-based erotic romance that, over four books, will take us from rangthiath Mira’s innocent pleasure-giving beginnings and plunge us into an internecine conflict that will rip her from all she knows.
Think Jacqueline Cary (Kushiel’s Dart) meets George R.R. Martin (Song of Fire and Ice series) meets Anne Rice (Beauty series).
Mira’s world is an omni-sexual landscape where pleasure is ordained by the great goddess, Rangtha, and the people of her kith house cater to her worshipers in every way imaginable — without prejudice towards orientation or taste.
Which means there’s plenty of het, m/m, and f/f couplings. And that’s before Mira loses here virginity. Imagine the possibilities in future editions! Wonders await us all.
Born into the pleasure world of Kith House, Rangtha in the fading city of Nameda, Mira is poised to enter the ranks of the revered pleasure-giver. Her only goal is to serve her goddess, Rangtha, by giving her virginity to a worthy recipient.
Yet she’s an innocent, unaware of the strife that surrounds her. Rival mentors pit themselves one against the other. Rapacious citizens exuberantly bid for hers virginity. And shadowy factions — for good or for ill — see Mira as the symbol of the future.
Rarely has one so innocent had to stand up to dangers so blatant. But rarely has Nameda seen the likes of Mira, a celebrant determined to fulfill her goal according to the ways of her goddess.
Training Desires. Spinning Mira’s world into existence has been one of the most exhuberant writing experiences of my life and I hope you’ll help me make Training Desires a Ravenous Romance bestseller so I can continue to sping her world, and other equally exciting realms, into existence.
March 26th, 2009 | Category: In General |
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At long last, I’ve brought Weaving Erotic Wonders into the 21st century via WordPress. I’ve tried to preserve as much of the site’s overall look while turning clutter into consolidated clean lines and I still have some odds-and-ends wonkiness to clean-up, but the site is done enough to launch and I hope you find the results pleasing.
When I started blogging almost a decade ago (!) at my signature site, Pursed Lips, weblogs were primitive things. Believe it or not, the tools that allowed a comment section didn’t yet exist (well, outside of the alpha versions of Things To Come). Neither did blogrolls. Really, we just listed our links and wrote pointed little insights about them. If other bloggers wanted to comment on something you said, they linked to you and lent their two cents via their own blogs.
God, what cavemen we were back then!
The cavemen is me is going to be a tad agitated that I have to trust WordPress’s architectural over my own primitive (and often limited) coding instincts, but I’m delighted to have so many tools on hand. Special thanks to my good friend, Roger, who dragged me by the hair into modern times.
If you’re looking at WEW via a blog feed, please come visit directly. And whether you’re a long time reader or have just discovered me, comment! Honestly, having caught the twitblog bug this last year, I can’t believe what a hermit I’ve been through the years. Maybe I’ll turn into a social butterfly now!
Regardless, I welcome your participation and camaraderie.
I’ve been away in France buying books, but life’s been a touch more mundane than that. On the accomplishment side of things, I turned in my second novel to Ravenous Romance, a fantasy entitled Desire’s Pursuit that the start of a four-part series. It was hard work, but wonderfully rewarding. I’m about to start the second volume, which will return me to the craziness of immersing myself in a fantasy world for a some hours most every day of the week.
Somehow, I have to figure out how to blog both here and at Pursed Lips at least a couple of times a week. No more once every few weeks, damn it!
That said, what did I mean about France and book-buying? Well, a recent episode of CBS Sunday Morning included a story about book shopping in Paris, covering everything from your obsessive bibliophile to the odd-job, eccentric raconteur known as a book scout but ultimately portrayed Paris as center of the book-selling universe.
Honestly, this kind of story waxes completely romantic for me. It beckons me. Bibliophile that I am, I’ve added Paris to the Book Trips I Want to Make over the next decade. Why? Because I love hunting for books. I love the pursuit, scanning piles for elusive titles. I love the rush of joy I feel when I spot a find and take it into hand.
Don’t let my modern propensity for the e-book fool you. While I embrace New Tech, I still love the Old Form. So much so that I must see Paris before I die.
Finishing the work on my next Ravenous Romance novel, Desire’s Pursuit, is commanding almost all of my time, but I have taken time out to post a book trailer for Blind Seduction at YouTube. And I’ve written a couple of entries for Ravenous Romance’s author blog.
To introduce myself to Ravenous Romance readers, I blogged about how I came to write erotica and erotic romance, first with The Transition and then with Then There’s the Sex. I’ll write about different schools of thought in my next entry.
Soon you’ll find some newly update links in my Novels section and here on the template. Keep an eye out!
It grips us, this cold, and I try to seal myself off from it. I stay indoors to avoid breathing it, to avoid the headache and asthma that threaten at first breath. I close my curtains at night, a barrier that deters the cold and insulates me in warmth. Yet as I sit in relative comfort, I’ve noticed how many notable people have died in recent days. Every day a new report — sometimes as many as three — tells me of another passing.
Usually, I chalk it up to this hard winter’s cold and move on with my day. But today I felt its chill. Andrew Wyeth has died.
The art world will forever debate his merits as a artist, whether he qualifies as contemporary or parochial, but I remember him for one thing: The affect his noted Christina’s World had on my late mother. Perhaps my mother was drawn originally to Wyeth’s work because, like the rest of America, she was drawn to its realism in an age of abstraction and confusion. But when she saw Christina’s World, she felt someone had captured the essence of her experiences as a thirteen-year-old girl. No other painting ever resonated with her like Christina’s World and I will always remember her telling me, her ten-year-old daughter, about the work as one of the most revealing stories she ever divulged to me.
When she looked at it, she saw herself in that field, crippled by polio and shunned by the rest of the world. When she looked at the field, she saw not the rough, hilly lands of Maine, but the broad open expanse of the prairie of Illinois. She saw obstacle and ostracism. When she gazed at the dour, distant house, she saw the deep poverty of The Great Depression. She saw a place where rural Midwestern jobs were so scare, her father would not find work until the World War II forced the railroads back into business.
My mother saw the sorrow of her young life in that painting, but Wyeth gave her something in return. He gave her a sense of dignity, a sense of acknowledgment and validation. Yes, he seemed to say, your experience was real. Claim it and move on.
Typical hardened Yankee stoicism.
I suspect Wyeth had to be stoic about Christina’s World. The The Museum of Modern Art paid a measly $1,800 for it, and today it hangs not in a large exhibit room but in a small, obscure hallway of the museum along with a few other pieces MoMA had no idea what to do with.
I know. I came across it last summer when my daughter and I spent an afternoon there. She had gushed with excitement, finding herself surrounded by the very works she’d studied in college art history and media classes. I had basked in her enthusiasm, glad I lucked out in giving her such a meaningful experience. But when we turned that one corner and brief in that small, cramped hallway and spied Christina’s World, I almost started crying.
I did not expect to find myself before the very revelatory work that had once give me such insight into my mother’s heart. I did not expect to find myself passing on the tale of my mother and Christina’s World to my daughter then and there, right before the very symbol of my mother’s crucible.
Coincidentally, it’s 9 degrees Fahrenheit in Cushing, Maine where Wyeth painted Christina’s World and it’s also 9 degrees in Shelby County, Illinois where my mother experienced polio and poverty. Somehow, we’ve managed to reach a balmy 16 in here north central Connecticut. But I’m even warmer, thanks to an old memory made fresh.
As the snow flies, I’m celebrating the recent release of my new Ravenous Romance novel, Blind Seduction, and my gay romance tale, 10 Lords A Leaping. It’s a wonderful way to see out the year, especially as the snow flies here in New England.
It’s deeply rewarding to see ideas imagined and put to prose see publication, and I’m happy to be in the new media mix that’s the e-book world. (This, despite a home filled with printed books and the collector’s habits that go with it.)
For quite some time, I felt like my novels would never see the light of day. I couldn’t find a print publisher to save my life that was interested in any romantic erotic that stepped beyond light bondage and role-playing and into authentic BDSM storytelling. (This, despite the 20-plus year popularity of Anne Rice’s Beauty books.) But Carnal Desire Publishing and, later, Ravenous Romance, changed all that for me, for which I’m deeply grateful.
I’m also grateful to Lori Perkins at RR’s blog where she acknowledged me as a “prominent short story and e-book author who really knows the BDSM territory. In this novel, she’s written an amazingly romantic tale of a couple’s visit to an S&M retreat as an anniversary present.”
To top it all off, Ravenous Romance has bought my four-book fantasy series that follows a devotee to a goddess of sexual pleasure as she journeys from initiate to captive to outcast, only to return to avenge her goddess against a usurper. Lori calls it a cross between “Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series and Anne Rice’s Beauty books.” I’d add “with a dash of George R. R. Martin” for those of you who like multiple characters rotating through each chapter. Regardless, it’ll be exciting to see my Kith series into publication.
Before this entry threatens to turn this blog into a gratitude journal, let me wish you all a Happy and Prosperous New Year. And you can guess what my one resolution will be — BLOG MORE!
I’m happy to report that Ravenous Romance launched today, bringing its cache of provocative erotic romance to avid readers everywhere. You’ll find a handful of initial novels and short stories there in ebook and audio formats — with more to coming daily mid-month.
My first novel with Ravenous Romance, Blind Seduction, will drop December 20th. And I couldn’t be happier. The editors I’ve worked with appreciate solid, exciting story-telling, dedicate the resources to copy editing necessary to make a strong book exceptional, and are remarkably, enthusiastically open to most any erotic variation you can think of.
I’ve also contributed to what will be a Twelve Days of Christmas selection of short stories, scheduled to debut during the holiday season. Ambitious me, but I ran with Ten Lords A’Leaping, making it a hot, M/M tale of guys getting it on. Yum.
And I’ve almost completed my second novel for RR as well, a fantasy tale called Desire’s Pursuit that I hope will become a multi-novel series. More on that as it develops.
FYI, fellas: Yes, Ravenous Romance is primarily geared for women and, yes, you will find romantic elements in its offerings, but I can guarantee you that if you like the erotic word, you’ll enjoy this publisher’s titles. Personally, I haven’t had to scale back any of my erotic writing with Ravenous Romance; I’ve only had to expand the connectedness of my principal characters, an element that existed in most of my previous erotica, just to a lesser degree.
Hope you’ll check out the site and buy a couple of ebooks. Hey, it keeps us lusty writers working!
I’m pleased to announce that Ravenous Romance has released my newest novel, 
(This, despite the 20-plus year popularity of Anne Rice’s Beauty books.) But Carnal Desire Publishing and, later, Ravenous Romance, changed all that for me, for which I’m deeply grateful.